The High Divide

by Lin Enger

He wanted to tell his sons that he’d lived for years in a shadow world, everything seemingly half real, the sky dim, the sun weak, the taste of his favorite foods—apples, fresh bread, fried eggs—dull and sad. That he had often felt invisible, surprised when men nodded to him in the street. That some nights, lying in the dark, wife beside him and boys in the loft above, he’d feared they were all part of an elaborate dream, gone at first light. He wanted to explain to them about his sins, about his hope of finding relief from God, and of course about his leaving—but he couldn’t summon the words, not yet. Or at least there was no coming at things straight on, with Eli sitting there like a stranger, all the baby fat gone out of his face, and Danny curled on his side, moaning and twitching inside his pain, arms wrapped around his head.

  “You can rest now, it’s all right,” he told Danny, and sponged his neck and back with a damp rag.

  When Danny finally slept, Ulysses got up and went down to the river to get some air, Eli following after him, and there in the paling darkness he recounted to his son an older story, from another time, a story he was able to tell—about himself at ten, when he hitched his father’s new stallion to the spring wagon, this against his father’s orders, the stallion being young and wild. It bolted of course and ran off, careening down a hill and through a yard, where the wagon it pulled struck an old collie dog, the neighbor girl’s favorite pet.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Eli asked. “This isn’t what I came to hear.”

  They were squatting side by side in the sand and watching the river go by, black and shimmering. A fish rolled to the surface and flipped its silver tail. Birds were calling already. Sandpipers with their high straight notes, and doves, too, low and soft. The sun was an hour yet from rising, the morning starting to lighten around them.

  “I picked up that dog,” he said. “It was crushed, dead, and I hauled it home and buried it behind the barn. I didn’t want anybody knowing about it, especially my dad. Except I couldn’t keep it to myself, either—I was too young for secrets back then. I ended up telling an old man who lived in a cabin down the road, a blind man with no teeth in his head. His well had gone dry, and I hauled water for him. He wasn’t given much to conversation and generally only nodded when spoken to.”

  “And this blind man told your dad,” Eli said.

  “No, he didn’t. He told me I should tell the girl, because she was the one who had been wronged, she was the one I’d hurt. But you see, I hadn’t expected any advice—I was only getting it off my chest.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “I did. I had to work up the courage, though it took me a few days. And naturally she cried and made me take her back behind the barn to dig up her dog, which stank to high heaven, maggots all over it. Then she told her dad, who told mine, and that was the worst part of the whole thing, the whipping I got from him. And the fact he wouldn’t let me forget what I had done.”

  “We saw Mrs. Powers in Bismarck,” Eli said. “She’d sent you a letter that we read, me and Danny. We never showed it to Mom.”

  “I suppose you have it with you.”

  Eli withdrew it from his pocket, saying, “Mother is unsettled, hardly able to think straight. And she fears we might lose the house.”

  Nodding, hating himself, Ulysses took the letter and slipped it inside his coat next to the leather pouch. But he was not going to be pushed into changing course, not now, and he set his jaw against the idea, looking hard into his son’s eyes. “I meant to send money, I did,” he said, “but it’s not been easy to come by. And your mother is stronger than you know. She will find a way to hang on.”

  “I didn’t want to leave her,” Eli said. “At least not by herself. I meant for Danny to stay behind.”

  “Yes, the boy has no business out here, he isn’t strong enough.”

  “You’re telling me that?” Eli snapped. “You can’t tell me anything.”

  Ulysses felt a wash of shame across his face and looked away. “You’re right, of course,” he said, quietly. “And you have to know that I didn’t want to leave her, either. I love your mother. It was the hardest thing—I miss her so much. And I didn’t want to leave you and Danny.”

  “But you did leave us.”

  For a little while they sat without speaking, Ulysses absorbing just how much he’d damaged those he loved most. And yet no less certain of what he was doing. “I need to work my way up to this,” he said.

  “Mrs. Powers told us that you served with Custer,” Eli said.

  “That’s right. And what did she say about it?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot. That you and her husband were good friends.”

  “We were, yes.” Ulysses nodded.

  “Who is she, anyway?” Eli asked. “To you, I mean?”

  “My dead friend’s wife, Eli,” Ulysses said. “Only that. Now run and check on your brother, will you? Make sure he’s all right.” Ulysses got to his feet, knees and hips burning after too long in a crouch, and watched his son go up the bank and duck inside. In less than a minute he was on his way back, coming fast—though he looked off-balance somehow, his gait uncertain.

  Eli said, “He’s still sleeping.”

  “We’ll send him back as soon as he’s better,” Ulysses said. “Put him on the train for home.”

  Eli’s face was closed, his brow squeezed tight, and Ulysses could feel the pressure of his eyes. “Fine, but you’re not sending me home,” the boy said. “I’m not going back, no matter what you say. I have a right to know what you’re doing here. I’m not a stranger like you make me out, and I’m telling you now, I won’t let you out of my sight till I know what’s going on. Do you hear me? I’ll never leave. I won’t give you a moment of peace.”

  “All right, then.” Ulysses led him to a tipped-over willow tree lying parallel to the water and sat down on its trunk. Eli sat, too. It was morning now, all the stars dissolved, and across the river a man poled out from the bank in a fishing skiff and let the current take him.

  “About that dog,” Eli said. “The person you should have told first was your father. Not the old blind man, and not the girl.”

  Ulysses nodded.

  “Just start anywhere,” Eli said.

  And so he did, with the war, his first one, explaining that he wasn’t young when it finally came to its end, twenty-five, lines in his face already, the world in his bones. He’d been in the Minnesota Ninth, marching up and down Missouri and Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas. And Nashville, Tennessee, where he saw Landy Cooper, a boy he’d grown up with, lose his head to a cannonball. Afterward, back in St. Paul, he was plain worn out, lacking any notion of what to do with the rest of his life, of what he wanted or what might be required of him. After two years, he reenlisted. He took a train down to Fort Riley, Kansas, and joined up with the brand-new Seventh Cavalry.

  “I don’t see why you went back in,” Eli said. “Why you left your family again.”

  Ulysses brought out his makings and began a pipe for himself, noting as he filled the bowl and tamped it down the way his son watched closely, eyeing the buckskin pouch. He struck a match and lit up.

  “My parents were gone by this time. They died during the war—that was part of it. And though I lived with my sister and her husband, and they wanted me to stay on, there was something about St. Paul that I couldn’t abide any longer. I woke up mornings wanting to pound the walls, kick my way out of that house. I had a decent job, working for a builder, learning that trade. But all the same, I thought I might do something terrible. I was afraid I might start screaming at somebody just to see fear in their eyes. I thought some morning on the way to work I might jump off the horse car, walk into one of those Summit Avenue mansions, and tell the man eating his breakfast I was there for my peace of mind and that he owed me a portion of his, whatever portion that might be, I didn’t know.”

  Ulysses paused to rub the palm of his hand over his face. He drew on his pipe but it was cold and he had to relight it.

  Eli waited
.

  “So when I heard the army was mustering up a new regiment to handle the Indian problem, I bought my ticket to Fort Riley. We were a ragtag crew, believe me. A few veterans of the war, like myself. A whole passel of men just off the boats who barely spoke the language. Dirt farmers looking for a free horse and the first chance to desert. A few young boys just trying to get out from under their old man. But don’t you know, Custer managed to bring us all together—at the outset, anyway. Gave us a band and a marching song. He had that long yellow hair, you know, and fringes on his leather clothes. And put on a strut that made us think, Here’s a man that knows what he’s about. It’s a strange thing, Eli, let me tell you. Men have a weakness that way, a need to find some king or preacher, a politician or a general, and then offer themselves up to him. It’s a human trait that’s come to make me ill. Respect where it’s due, now that’s one thing. But listen here—don’t be quick to look up to a man who seems to take pleasure in your looking up to him.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Good. You learned it early then.”

  “What sort of Indian problem?” Eli said.

  “I’m getting there, damn it.” His stomach flared in anger, and it was everything Ulysses could do not to turn his back and walk off. He raised a finger at his son. “You don’t need to hear this,” he said.

  “I am going to hear it. I’m going to hear it now.”

  “You’re a stubborn boy,” Ulysses said, glaring at Eli, who glared back. God protect him, he thought.

  “Just talk,” Eli told him. “Just talk.”

  Of course talk was the terrible thing, and always had been. Talk seemed impossible—but more than that, foolish, like stepping off the peak of a barn into thin air. Nothing to hold you up. He looked hard into the eyes of his son and took a breath.

  He said, “There was an endless parley in those days between the Indians and the government. Talks and treaties about the reservations and what their boundary lines should be and who belonged on which ones. How they should feed themselves with the game all hunted out. Things of that nature. The tribes, of course, couldn’t control their young men, who wanted nothing to do with any more deals, nothing to do with the reservations, or with the settlers coming in, or the railroads. Men who didn’t have wives or children and could still afford to think about their honor. And others too, older ones who saw nothing to gain by giving in again. And so they were on the loose, raiding settlements and ranches, and generally making trouble. Drawing blood. They didn’t want to stay home and raise vegetables on land too dry to grow anything. They didn’t want to stay put inside the lines somebody drew on a map. Do you understand? They had nothing to lose. They’d already lost it all.”

  Eli nodded.

  “So that was the situation after the war, and Custer was the man the generals thought could bring them to heel.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “I knew him, sure, but he was no friend. He didn’t consort with the likes of me. A high-handed fellow, the sort to hang portraits of himself on the walls of his house. A true fact, which I know from the people that cleaned for him. But yes, I was acquainted with him. The man was too proud for his own good, and a damn fool.”

  “Our teacher said he’s a hero.”

  Ulysses allowed himself a quiet laugh. “He would like that. He’d like it very much. But there are two or three hundred men whose wives and children have other names for him.”

  A stiff westerly breeze had come up with the sun, and Ulysses pulled his collar higher. Eli took out his felt hat and put it on. The ferry driver had arrived, and the first man he fetched from the north side ambled over to them, shading his eyes with a palm. He had no neck to speak of, and big rounded shoulders. He pointed uphill at the shack.

  “Radish here?” he asked.

  “He’s not,” Ulysses said. “I’m only watching the place for him, keeping squatters out. He should be along tomorrow or the day after.”

  “I’ll come back then.”

  Ulysses said, “You’ve come from up north, I see. I’m heading that way myself. I was thinking I’d pull a wagon, collect bones. Will I find trails?”

  The big man grimaced. Trails, yes, he explained, if you wanted to call them that—but no people to speak of, and too much bad ground, and brackish water in the streams. “You might think of striking out in a different direction, unless you have reason to head that way.”

  Reason enough, Ulysses thought. Then, as he watched the man head uphill to town, he turned back to his son. He explained the way it was in the fall of 1868, chasing Indians all through the territories, never catching up, always a day or two behind, and how as winter came on, Custer—or it might have been Sheridan—conceived of a new plan. Instead of putting the campaign to rest until spring, this time they’d wait for the deep snows and terrible cold. Wait for the tribes to settle in, the men in camp with their women and children. And then hit them. It had never been done like that before.

  As it happened, Black Kettle was the one they caught up with, a chief who’d sat down with the generals, a man of caution and compromise, trying the best he could to keep his young men close. A man of peace. None of which mattered to Custer. When reports came in from the scouts, the Seventh marched hard for Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita, down in the Indian Territory. It was the end of November, behind a heavy storm, the air so cold it froze the hair in their nostrils, and Custer ordered a dawn attack.

  “We went in at first light, Eli. No wind at all that morning, but cold, I’m telling you—it ached in my lungs. And still I was sweating, my shirt soaked through. I remember looking down from the scrub trees above their camp and seeing an old man come stooping out of his lodge and move through the snow. Slowly. When he reached an aspen tree, he took a piss. We all watched him, the thin stream of his urine steaming as it entered the snow, and him standing there, one arm stiff against the aspen, leaning on it. When he finished, the order came, the bugler blew the charge, and we jabbed our heels into the flanks of our mounts and rode down through the snow. I remember the breathing of our horses, and I remember the sound of the band behind us, if you can believe it—that damned Irish march Custer loved so much—the trumpets blaring and the snare drum rattling like a sack of bones. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off that old man, who turned to watch us come, his mouth open, yelling something—warning the camp, I guess—though nobody would have heard him above the noise we were making. As I got close to him, his jaw flew off and he sat right down. But I was past him and shooting at somebody else, who’d jumped out of one of the lodges with a rifle. He went down too. And then we were like water swirling through that camp, men on horses and men on foot, all of us pumping shots into their tipis, and whole families spilling out, women with babies, boys and girls, old women—and a few men too, most everyone moving toward the trees and bushes down by the river, toward the cuts in the earth, ravines where they might find cover.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this next part, Eli—what happened then and what my life became, after. An act of forgetting is what it was, and then of hating myself, and then of hating people whose crimes were nothing compared to my own. Do you see? One thing grows into the only thing. That’s how it works. I don’t want you to be hearing this, I don’t want to be telling it. A boy stepped from a tipi and drew down on me, both hands on this big Colt revolver, which jumped and boomed. I felt a blow on my head, right here, like someone had struck me with their fist.”

  “Your ear,” Eli said.

  “Yes. And my horse wheeled and reared, and I brought it back around. And then the boy was gone, back inside the tipi, or so I figured. I might have let him go—I like to think I would have—but my friend Jim Powers was there beside me, and he swung off his horse and went in after him. So I jumped down too, angry as the pain started in, blood all over my right side now, filling my right eye, and I followed him. I ran inside, and I saw two little boys, not one but two, the other one not more than three or four years old. And a young woman also,
their mother. The boy who’d shot me was standing beside her, not trying to hide behind her either, but facing me straight on, the Colt hanging from his hand. He didn’t lift it or point it at me. It must have been out of shells. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old, Eli, smaller than your brother. And his face—there wasn’t fear in it, only hate. I had every reason to walk away and let that boy live, but the pain in my head was screaming and the hate in that boy’s face was burning in me, and I shot him, right here”—Ulysses touched his own chest—“and then Jim shot the other boy, I don’t know why, and we ran out of there, my gun hand weighing more than the rest of me put together. A few minutes later we couldn’t help going back. We went back for the mother, to get her out of there. But she was gone already, only the two dead boys were left. That’s when I took the buckskin pouch, it was hanging from the lodge pole. Jim took a pair of beaded mocassins.”

  “You killed a boy,” Eli said. He looked pale and sick.

  “Yes.” Ulysses covered his face with a hand. “And that was not all. The mother, too, we killed her.”

  “You said you didn’t kill her. You said she was gone when you went back.”

  “No, we killed her. We killed the whole family.” He paused to breathe, his nostrils full of the blood smell, full of burning flesh, his stomach cramping from it. “Among the prisoners we took that day was an old woman who knew the beadwork of the pouch I had. She knew the maker of it—the mother of the boy I’d killed. She told me the mother survived the attack that morning. Avoided capture too. But instead of waiting to tell her husband what happened—he was out with a hunting party, as were many of the men that day—she drowned herself in the river. So her death, too, it’s all mine.”

  Ulysses forced himself to look at his son, who sat with his knees against his chest, hands clasped in front of his mouth, gaze focused on a point in the distance. Eli didn’t move a muscle—and though Ulysses wanted to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder, close the space between them, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He cleared his throat to go on, but Eli, coming back to himself, spoke first.