This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  “We’re headed for a camp down in the canyon,” Cracked Bone Thrower told him. “From there it is a couple of days’ travel to a special place. One where Puhagan wants to take you. It is an old place, one where puha rises from the ground through cracks in the stone. A place where Water Babies and nynymbi and dzoavits emerge from the Underworld.”

  “And what does that have to do with me?”

  “He will see if you are good or evil, Butler Hancock. There, he and the spirits will look into your souls.”

  Butler had to turn his concentration to a tricky descent where the trail pitched almost straight down. Here he had to skip to stay ahead of the horses, hooves locked as they slid. The pack dogs, he’d noted, had simply jumped from boulder to boulder. No wonder these people didn’t have horses.

  When the trail went back to simple switchbacks, he asked, “What do you mean, souls? I’ve only got one.”

  Cracked Bone Thrower raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You plumb sure about that, coon? You see ghosts, yes? You say you see them with your eyes, but my eyes don’t see nobody. Maybe you got another soul in yer body? Puhagan, he wonders if’n you got the usual three souls, or maybe a fourth.”

  “Three souls? A fourth? That’s…” But he couldn’t quite allow himself to say it was crazy.

  “Sounds like satanic nonsense to me,” Pettigrew grumbled where he walked off to the side.

  Cracked Bone Thrower might have been loaded with feathers, instead of the eighty-some pounds of meat slung on his back, given the way he hopped onto a log that had fallen across the trail. He said, “Among the Newe we know a person has three souls. Your suap is the soul that fills your lungs and breath. The mugwa is the soul what lives in your bones and blood. Finally your nuvashieip is the seeing soul that slips in and out of your body. You see through its eyes when you dream, when you see faraway places. Puhagan wonders if perhaps you somehow have two different nuvashieip locked inside you.”

  “And how is he going to find this out?” Butler asked skeptically, glancing sidelong to where his men marched beside him; somehow they maintained their footing on the steep mountainside.

  Pettigrew was grinning, shaking his head dismissively. Billy Templeton, however, looked worried. The others, marching along, kept shooting Cracked Bone Thrower wary sidelong glances.

  Kershaw, however, had been missing since he’d announced the arrival of the Sheep Eaters. That realization sent a tingle of warning through Butler’s gut. The sergeant hadn’t been acting right. Not since Butler’s stern rebuke for bringing up Chickamauga on the trail.

  But this notion that he had another soul stuck inside him?

  Silly heathen superstition!

  “And what will the puhagan do if he thinks my souls are evil?” Butler asked.

  “He will kill you. And then, as each of your diseased souls emerges from your body, he will destroy them. If your mugwa is good, he will leave your body for the wolves and coyotes. If it is evil, he will roll a big boulder onto your bones to trap them there forever.”

  Butler ground his teeth, seeing hard promise in Cracked Bone Thrower’s black eyes. Little sparks of fear began to flicker around his heart.

  96

  September 8, 1867

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the preacher said, one hand on the pages of his open Bible. “You may kiss the bride.”

  Sarah watched Doc lift the light blue veil from Aggie’s scar-lined face. No, not Aggie. Bridget. Bridget O’Fallon Hancock. It had come as a shock to Sarah when the preacher called her friend Bridget, but of course Aggie would have wanted to be married under her given name.

  Doc leaned forward, placing his lips on Bridget’s, kissing her with a sensitive passion Sarah had only known with Bret. The two of them seemed to melt together, as if the small church were illusory and the two lovers the only reality in the firmament.

  The preacher cleared his throat, slightly embarrassed, and murmured, “Reckon y’all got the rest of yer lives fer that.”

  Doc and Bridget broke apart, grinned, and turned, both shooting radiant smiles at Sarah.

  Doc took Bridget’s arm and marched her up to Sarah. “May I present my wife, Mrs. Hancock?”

  “My pleasure,” Sarah told Bridget, folding her into a hug. “I couldn’t wish you a better man. And look! We’re truly sisters!”

  Bridget hugged her fiercely. “This is the happiest day of my life.”

  “Come,” Sarah said as they parted. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering food to be delivered to Doc’s … uh, your house. I thought we might have a quiet supper before I retire and leave you to contemplate your happiness. It should be a family celebration.”

  Doc was giving her a thoughtful look as he held Bridget’s arm and walked from the crude little church. Why Doc had chosen it was beyond her, given his constant preoccupation with God, justice, suffering, and the inherent flaws in the universe.

  A carriage waited to take them the three blocks to Doc’s. An indulgence Sarah had insisted on.

  “Don’t be a silly duck,” she’d told him. “I insist. You shall be treated as royalty.”

  She’d been ready to pull the cord on the cannon and shoot the moon when it came to the wedding, only to have Doc and Aggie demur.

  “We want it small,” Doc had insisted. “Just the three of us and the preacher. We don’t want anyone counting the days. And we sure don’t want announcements in the Rocky Mountain News. God alone knows what that skunk Byers or his team of scribblers will publish. It’s enough that Aggie will be my wife, due and legal, and that she and I will wear our rings.”

  At Doc’s she led the way up the stairs and into the small living room. Mam had done herself spectacularly, having laid the table with a roasted goose, a baked potato, and a loaf of fresh-baked bread with chokecherry jam. All of which, given the shortages and deplorable lack of fresh vegetables in the city, was a culinary miracle.

  “Oh, my God,” Bridget cried, placing hands to her face. “This is a feast for kings!”

  “Well,” Sarah admitted, “at least for a king and queen. I shall act as your squire and handmaiden.” She stepped around the table as Doc held Bridget’s chair, then she held his as he was seated.

  Sarah poured Madeira from the last bottle surviving from the Angel’s Lair opening, and offered the toast. “To Mr. and Mrs. Philip Hancock. Huzzah! Huzzah! And may love and prosperity fill all the days of your lives.”

  “Here! Here!” Doc and Bridget cried in unison.

  Sarah served—a feeling of contentment warm in her breast. “I do wish Maw, Butler, and Billy could be here to see this.”

  “Life didn’t quite give us the paths we hoped to walk, did it?” Doc asked, taking a bite of roast goose. “Oh my, that is wonderful. Mam just makes miracles, doesn’t she?”

  “The way she tells it,” Bridget added, “slaves had to find ways to make do with almost nothing, so they figured out recipes that made food their masters wouldn’t eat into delicacies.”

  “In the end, it’s always about making the best out of hard times, isn’t it?”

  “You referring to my condition, Doc?” Bridget said hesitantly, her fork halfway to her mouth.

  “Good God, no!” Doc replied in shock. “I was thinking of prison camp, and how men with nothing, not even hope, managed to hang on.” He took a deep breath, reaching across the table for Bridget’s hand. “We are having a child. Together. As a husband and his wife do. I love you, Bridget. More today than I have ever loved you. Events forced us to move with greater rapidity than perhaps I would have liked, but as I told you, I’ve been thinking of marriage for some time now. I could not be happier.”

  Sarah watched them staring into each other’s eyes, at the way they smiled with such intimacy. Damn, she missed Bret. Too often she caught herself dreaming of his smile and laugh. At times she practically ached for his company, especially that wry amusement with which he viewed the world. For those months that she and Bret had been together, she’d had a fit mate for body a
nd soul. In the aftermath of his murder, she’d been lonelier than even during those terrible days after she fled from Billy.

  “What’s wrong, Sarah?” Bridget asked, sensitive as usual to her moods. “That’s the missing-Bret look.”

  Sarah smiled, spread her hands wide. “Guilty. If the two of you have half, just half, of what we had, you’ll be daisies for the rest of your lives.”

  “We’ll make do,” Doc said, thoughtfully watching her. “With a child coming, Bridget and I have been talking. It’s no longer just the two of us. The child will change things.”

  “Doc and I will want to relocate,” Bridget said. “Sometime. After the child is born. We’re thinking maybe California. Someplace where Doc can establish a surgery where no one knows who we are. What we’ve been.”

  Sarah gave Bridget a wink. “Were I in your shoes, I’d do the same.” She cut a thick slice from the breast. “My goals are compatible. I think we should sell the Angel’s Lair by next summer, Aggie. The new girls are working out. The playacting is popular, and we’ve added an element the johnnies have never known they were missing. If we were to push it to two years, I think the newness would be worn off, or someone is going to copy our action.”

  “And then what are you going to do?” Doc asked.

  “Property.” She glanced between the two of them. “I’ve been buying up lots in Cheyenne. Railroad should be there in a month or so. And believe me, the railroad is going to change this country like nothing else. You’d be surprised what a girl can learn when Big Ed, George Nichols, or Pat O’Reilly is whispering in her ear.”

  “You worry me sometimes, sister,” Doc told her. “Your playmates are scary.”

  She smiled wistfully. “Philip, my world started to crumble the day Butler and Paw rode off to war. Silly girl that I was, I thought all I had to do was marry the right man. Which, of course, Paw would see to. I only needed to look pretty and offer myself as a brood mare to produce my husband’s children. It wouldn’t have been on the basis of love as you and Bridget are doing, but a service in return for a place in my husband’s house, and the status I derived from his.”

  “And how is that different from what you have now? You’re still depending upon men. A lot of them as they pass through.”

  “Aggie and I own the house,” she told him with a deadly smile. “And we’re using it as a stepping-stone. But true power, brother, lies in money and property. I may be a fancy whore for the moment, but only until I can grow the value of the Angel’s Lair into enough capital to acquire the right property. And when I sell that, I’ll acquire even more property, until I can buy and sell the men who’ve bought and sold me.”

  Philip looked at her through somber eyes. “That sounds hard and cold, little sister. You used to have a romantic side, almost dreamy eyed as you talked about the future.”

  “That Sarah is long dead, Philip. Maybe it happened when men were bleeding and dying on our living room floor. Or the wagonloads of half-frozen, half-rotted corpses I hauled for the Yankees. Might have been Maw and me starving when the armies took our food. Anything that was left was gang-raped out of me by Dewley and his men. When I finally found I could love with all my heart, Parmelee shot it dead in my front door. Every lesson I’ve learned has taught me that the world is heartless, ruthless, and fit only for the strong and smart.”

  “And Parmelee’s still out there,” Bridget noted.

  “And Parmelee’s still out there,” Sarah repeated softly.

  Doc’s eyes mirrored a wounded soul, as if he shared every bit of her suffering and anger. Bridget, lips pursed, glanced anxiously at her husband.

  “We have all lost so much,” he said softly. “Suffered so much. I just wish … Well, never mind.”

  Sarah shook her head, raised her hands. “But let us forget about me. Today is about you. Both of you. And it is about family, and the realization that even though there are only three of us left, you and Aggie are building the future with that wonderful new life within her womb.”

  Sarah lifted her glass again. “To both of you, and to a better and brighter future!”

  “To the future,” they chimed, a rosy glow in Bridget’s cheeks. She looked so happy, so flushed with joy, that for a moment at least, Sarah could almost believe in hope again.

  97

  September 22, 1867

  The fire popped and crackled, shooting sparks up into the chilly night sky. Butler sat naked but for a sheephide blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His breath was visible with each exhalation and shone in the firelight as though golden.

  He, Cracked Bone Thrower, and Puhagan had traveled here—a three-day journey back down the Wind River and then west into the foothills, following the channel of a rushing, clear-watered creek that Cracked Bone Thrower had told him was called Water Belonging to Pandzoavitz—where on the northern bank, above a small clear-water lake, the puhagan had ordered a camp made just up from the shore and below a boulder-studded field that rose to a steep and rocky valley slope.

  “You must be clean inside and out, Man Who Talks to No One. There will be no food. No water. Just the praying.”

  Puhagan had erected a small, domed shelter with Cracked Bone Thrower’s help. For a solid day now, Butler had been walking down to the lake, bathing, and climbing the slope to the little sweat lodge where the puhagan had brushed Butler’s naked body with a branch of sagebrush, then scooped smoke from the fire with an eagle-wing fan and wafted it over Butler’s flesh. All the while the old man kept singing in the soft and sibilant Dukurika tongue.

  After each of these cleansings, Butler was urged into the cramped sweat lodge. Cracked Bone Thrower would lift stones from the fire with mule deer horns, and lay them inside the small lodge.

  After the puhagan had entered, he would close the flap, sealing them in darkness. Then, from a bladder, he would douse the white-glowing stones. Steam would explode in an angry sizzle. Within moments, Butler would be gasping for breath, his skin prickling, and sweat would run from his hide as if he were being baked alive.

  Having endured all that, he threw his head back and blinked up at the night, seeing a billion stars like frost across the sky. The Milky Way ran in a forked streak from horizon to horizon, only to be blocked by the black shadows of the narrowing mountain valley to either side.

  The men were crowded around, just out of the fire’s light. More than seeing them, Butler could feel their presence. Pettigrew—usually the complainer—was unusually sullen. And while Kershaw remained missing, Butler could sense the Cajun’s fear.

  That sent a shiver down his back. He’d never known Kershaw to be afraid of anything.

  At Puhagan’s barked command, Cracked Bone Thrower said, “Put your blanket down. Then lay on your back, looking up at the sky.”

  Butler nodded, arranging the sheep-hide blanket on the scrubby grass and lying down. The chill immediately ate into his chest, stomach, and thighs. He could feel his testicles knotting, his skin going to gooseflesh. Nevertheless, he endured, looking up at the night sky in all its crystal brilliance.

  Still singing, Puhagan leaned over him and began thumping on Butler’s body. First he tapped on his arms, then his shoulders, his chest, and belly. Next he thumped on Butler’s right leg starting at the thigh and moving down to the foot. Finally he did the left.

  Sitting back on his haunches, the old man raised his hands to the night sky, and sang with greater emphasis. When he finished, he reached into a pouch and removed a stone tube maybe five inches long, an inch in diameter, with a hole drilled through it.

  The man bent down, placed the tube to Butler’s shivering skin, and sucked vigorously at the upper arms. Then above Butler’s right and left breasts. Just up from his navel. In the hollow above his pubis bone, and on both thighs.

  “What was that?” Butler asked, as Puhagan straightened.

  Cracked Bone Thrower told him, “He has found poisoned places in your body. He has sucked them out.”

  Even as Cracked Bone Thrower said this
, the puhagan bent to the side, spitting what looked like a stream of bloody spit into the flames. As the expectorate hit the fire, it burst into a malignant yellow smoke that rose in a pillar.

  “Dear God,” Butler whispered.

  Puhagan turned, staring thoughtfully at Butler who was now shivering from the chill. He said something in Shoshoni, his voice firm.

  “Eat what the puhagan gives you,” Cracked Bone Thrower told him. “It is toyatawura. The Power plant. It will free your souls and allow you to see into the places of Power. Only when toyatawura has separated you from yourself, can you travel to the dark water world beneath the earth.”

  Butler took the bits of woody root the old man gave him, and chewed. It was all he could do to keep from making a face at the bitter taste. Even harder to finally swallow the stuff. It seemed to stick in his throat, sort of like trying to choke down a cocklebur.

  “Go,” Cracked Bone Thrower told him. “Take your blanket and follow the trails to the boulders. The spirits will watch you. Judge you. If you are lucky one will call to you. When you hear the voice calling from the stone, lie down before the spirit. There you will sleep. The puhagan will watch and see which spirits are called to you. Then they will tell him what to do with you.”

  “Just get up and walk up through the boulders?” Butler asked as he got to his feet, still trying to get the chewed root to go down.

  Did they really think a piece of woody root would separate him from his body? And what silliness was this anyway? Venturing to the water world? Spirits? It was the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-seven, for God’s sake! Not the Middle Ages when idiot superstition ruled the world.

  Cracked Bone Thrower pointed up the slope, his expression stern.

  Toyatawura? What kind of word was that?

  In the darkness, hobbling on his bare feet, Butler made his way up into the scattered boulders, some as large as a freight wagon. He tripped over low sagebrush, stubbed his toes on stones, and felt his way.