Doubtful Canon
Page 11
Snaking in the darkness, inching through juniper, rocks, and yucca, we moved back up Doubtful Cañon, waiting for the moon to rise, but clouds filled the air, keeping us cloaked in darkness and cold. The wind moaned. We neither saw nor heard any Indians, coming across only one Gila monster, scaring it off, before wolves began a frightful song.
There was no path, not along the rugged walls, and the rocks scratched my battered palms and knees, the branches of the alligator junipers shedding on my stolen hat, assaulting my nostrils, the bark carving my back. When the wolves stopped, a falcon screeched, and Whitey Grey stopped abruptly.
“’Tain’t no bird, that was,” he said softly, and sat up, silently pulling back the Winchester’s hammer.
A minute passed. Five. Ten. A full half hour we sat in the cold as the wind picked up, slowly building intensity, bringing with it the rumble of thunder. Dark clouds blackened the moon, and the dam burst.
Rain, brutally icy, fell in torrents, stinging like knives, soaking our clothes until we trembled.
“Glory be,” Whitey Grey said, lowering the rifle’s hammer. “Let’s make a beeline, chil’ren.” Lightning arced over the cañon, followed by a bellowing of thunder, and the white-skinned man ran, slipping, boots splashing in the mud. Cold and miserable, we followed, trying to keep up with him. We’d fall into blackness and wait, listening but hearing nothing now but the ferocity of the storm, waiting for that flash of lightning to reveal Whitey Grey’s location. There. I’d see him, or Jasmine might spot him, and we’d stumble in the direction.
A boulder stung my hand, and my pinky finger throbbed in agony, and, when lightning struck so close our ears popped, Jasmine Allison tossed away her knife, warning us to do the same with our weapons. “I’ve heard of cowboys getting killed by lightning,” she said, “striking their spurs and guns.”
“My pa’ll strike me dead if I lost his Colt,” Ian Spencer Henry said. “He’s gonna break out his razor strop, anyway, when he learns I took it, unless I share my sixteen hundred and sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents. And I bet Mister Grey would frown upon you was you to shuck his gun into some puddle, Jack.”
Lightning flashed again. “There!” I cried out, and pointed into the depths where I thought I’d spied Whitey Grey. “Let’s go.” I took the lead, keeping the Colt in my right hand. Lightning didn’t scare me half as much as being caught in a cañon by Apaches, or being left in the desert alone. We ran after Whitey Grey.
After a few minutes, the rain slackened, and a moment later the storm had raged past us. By then, however, we had lost Whitey Grey, and without the benefit of lightning, now well off in the distance, I held little hope of finding him again.
Instead, Whitey Grey found us.
“Hey, chil’ren!” his voice called out. “That be you?”
I answered him, and heard his joints popping, his breath heaving, a grunt, a curse, stones rolling, splashing in a puddle, then a larger splash. He stepped forward, reaching out, fumbling in the darkness, and patted my shoulder.
“How you feel?”
“F-f-f-f-ree-zing.” Jasmine’s teeth chattered. “I-I-I-I’m so cold.”
“Yeah, I knows it, but that storm, maybe it drove ’em Cherry Cows away. Softened up the ground some, too. Make it easier for y’all to dig up my gold. C’mon. That ranch ain’t much farther up the road.”
Ian Spencer Henry saw the light first.
He whispered a warning, and the albino crouched, not believing at first, even asking Jasmine and me to verify the small flickering light on the far side of Doubtful Cañon.
A reddish-white glow flickered, almost like a lightning bug, vanished, came back, and hovered about for a moment. The light began to fade, but now I could make out my comrades better, could perceive Jasmine squatting on a patch of bear grass behind a dead mesquite, her dark hair drenched, her whole body trembling. Ian Spencer Henry aimed his Army Colt at the fading light, growing smaller and smaller, and Whitey Grey tugged, twisted, and chewed on his mustache. I could distinguish the cañon rocks from the outline of the ranch house, knew the small light came from there. Only I could see more now, and, looking up, I realized the clouds had parted, moving with the storm, and the moon bathed us in reddish-yellow light.
The white-skinned man noticed it, too. “Raidin’ moon,” he said. “Comanch’ moon, we called it back in Texas. Now, I don’t know what ’em Cherry Cows think ’bout it, but ’tain’t no place to be out of doors in Texas when the moon be like this.”
“The light’s gone.” Ian Spencer Henry aimed the revolver barrel at empty, gray rocks.
“Th-th-that’s…the…h-h-house,” Jasmine said.
“Uhn-huh,” Whitey Grey said, frowning.
“You don’t….” Ian Spencer Henry looked at our leader for help. “You don’t think it’s…it’s a…ghost…do you?”
He didn’t answer. I stared away from the moon, and studied the house in the rocks, waiting for the light to reappear; but it never did.
“Candle,” I said at last. “It had to be a candle.”
“Yeah.” Ian Spencer Henry’s head bobbed. “Candle. Yeah. But who was holding it? A ghost?”
Jasmine stopped her chattering teeth. “Maybe…the r-r-rancher came…b-b-back.”
“’Tain’t likely,” Whitey Grey said, but he sounded uncertain. “And Cherry Cows gots no use for candles. Ghosts, neither. No….”
My body shivered. The moon slowly slid westward, swallowed briefly by a passing cloud, then emerging as the peregrine falcon cried out from the cañon walls.
“Let’s hoof it, chil’ren,” the albino said, and he took off running, slipping once on the wet granite, exploding with speed, crouching, running in a criss-cross motion toward the rock house. Fearing that the falcon was Apache rather than raptor, we followed.
Until a bullet spanged off the rocks near us.
Another round echoed through the dark, but I spotted the muzzle flash as I dived behind a shrub, Jasmine sailing beside me, Ian Spencer Henry finding shelter by a boulder, and Whitey Grey scrambling behind a mound of dirt.
“Tarnation,” Ian Spencer Henry said. “I think that rain ruint all the powder in my pistol.”
A bullet whined overhead.
“Hey, you in the cabin!” Whitey Grey called out. “Stop shootin’. We’s white men!” Another bullet, closer this time. “And a li’l girlie.”
“Go away!”
I blinked away confusion and doubt. The voice came from the abandoned house we had passed that day. A woman’s voice. Not Apache. Not even Mexican. Frightened, she had to be, but more than handy with the rifle, although she hadn’t hit any of us yet.
“Listen…”
A round cut off Whitey Grey’s protest; and he snorted, rolled over, and looked at Jasmine and me. “Petticoat,” he said, and spat. “Worthless, miserable petticoat.” Shaking his head, he hollered back at the cabin. “Woman, we’s white, I tell you, and we just gots waylaid by Apaches up the cañon. There’s a raidin’ moon out, and I ain’t aimin’ to wait out here to gets a Cherry Cow arrow in my brisket. I said, let us come in there.”
“Go away!” she yelled again, but didn’t fire her rifle.
“Woman, you’s rilin’ me. Now start actin’ hospitable….”
The rifle shot clipped a mesquite branch near Whitey Grey.
Craning his neck, he scouted the territory between his position and the house and, a few minutes later, pointed the Winchester barrel at a rock corral to the left of the house.
“You chil’ren,” he said, “you run to that ol’ corral. Keep your heads down.”
“What?” Jasmine demanded, no longer stuttering and shivering from the cold.
“You heard me. I tol’ you I ramrod this outfit. Now run. ’Tain’t likely that hussy’ll shoot y’all down. Run. Run or, by grab, I’ll start shootin’ at you, and I ain’t gonna miss.”
When we didn’t follow his orders fast enough, he brought the Winchester up and sent a bullet between Jasmine and me.
We dived behind the wall. My ears rang from the gunfire, and then, lying on my chest, fighting for breath, wet, cold and scared, I located the apparition that was Whitey Grey, a wild ghost flashing through boulders and juniper, charging, rifle in his arms, mouth open, releasing a much more flendish battle cry than Ian Spencer Henry’s as he dived through the front door.
A gunshot boomed inside, loud, violent with a finality in its report.
Then…nothing.
Rolling over, I shot a look of concern at my friends. Another cloud hid the moon. A twig scratched in the cañon walls above us, and, when the falcon cried out again, I couldn’t wait any longer, and, scrambling to my feet, I darted for the stone house, crying out for my friends to follow me.
Follow me? Ian Spencer Henry passed me, screaming to Whitey Grey, assuming the white-skinned man hadn’t been killed by the woman inside, that we were coming in, to hold his fire, not to shoot us, that Apaches were amongst us. I slackened my pace, just long enough to grab Jasmine’s hand, and ran, crashing through the threshold and stumbling on the hard-packed earthen floor.
The moon reappeared, its eerie light stretching through the open window and door, and we saw Whitey Grey, two rifles in his hands, making sure we were alone, and we were.
Whitey Grey…Jasmine Allison…Ian Spencer Henry…me…and a woman cowering in the corner, bruised arms wrapped around drawn-up knees, rocking back and forth.
Her auburn hair resembled a pat rack’s nest, frizzy, a tangled mess, her shoes scuffed and ripped, riding skirt caked in dried mud and grime, the sleeves of her blouse tattered. Though I had never seen her before, I knew her instantly.
“Miss Giddings?” I spoke softly.
Her eyes burned in recognition of her name, and she studied me curiously.
“Who are you?” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm.
“I’m Jack Dunivan. You don’t know me. I….”
“Fireplace’ll work,” Whitey Grey interrupted. “Got some wood inside, too. Let’s get some heat in this pigsty. Warm us up. Dry ’em rain-soaked duds of our’n.”
“But the Apaches…,” Ian Spencer Henry said.
“Cherry Cows knows we’s here,” he said. “Likely Mex bandits and ever’ other rascal this side of the border, after all that commotion.” He kicked a can, grabbed it, held it in the moonlight. “Glory be. Arbuckles’ coffee. Must’ve missed it when I was scoutin’ this place earlier.” He pried off the lid. “Plenty of grounds, too. No peppermint candy, but that’s all right. We’ll have us some breakfast afore sunup.”
He ordered Ian Spencer Henry to tend the fire, tossed the coffee can to Jasmine, grabbed a rifle, its stock splintered by a bullet, off the floor, and squatted before the frightened woman. “I tol’ you we was white. You kept on shootin’.” He let the old-model Henry clatter at her feet. “You’s plumb lucky I didn’t kill you, petticoat or not. You is Giddings’s daughter, ain’t you?”
Her head bobbed slightly.
“You was with a feller named Spoon.”
She looked away, shutting her eyes like a slamming door, and I studied the house, small but solid, with a heavy oaken door and window facing the cañon and another smaller window in the rear, each window equipped with oak or walnut shutters, all of them open, none barred. Had the woman thought to secure the door, she might have kept Whitey Grey at bay. Trash littered the floor, and I espied no furniture, just a pile of wood and a yellow candle resting on the top of an empty can of sugar. Jasmine busied herself pouring coffee into a battered pot, and I cringed, thinking that would be some awfully strong breakfast we’d be forced to drink.
Ian Spencer Henry begged me to help with the fire, and I started to go, but turned, glaring at Whitey Grey when he told Miss Giddings: “I buried Spoon.” He hadn’t done a lick of work, had watched while we had buried the old man. “What was left of him nohow. So you tell me this, girlie, what in the Sam Hill is you doin’ in this god-forsaken country, and, after ’em Cherry Cows hit you, how’d you make it
back here…alive?”
Chapter Thirteen
She didn’t speak for an hour, not until the sky turned gray and birds began to sing, not until flames roared in the fireplace, not until Ian Spencer Henry placed a steaming cup of black coffee, the one cup we had—after Whitey Grey had drunk his fill, of course—into her hands, not until Jasmine had given her a smile of encouragement. She sighed briefly, told us her name was Eleora, and tested the bitter brew. “Tell us, girlie,” Whitey Grey said, softer, gentler this time, and moved to the door, Winchester cradled in his arms, peering outside.
“I…I never knew my father,” Eleora Giddings began. “I….” Tears streamed down her face, but only for a moment. Resolutely she brushed them away with a torn strip of cloth. Another sip of coffee fortified her, and she tried again.
This is the story the petrified woman told:
I wasn’t even born when he left El Paso, I mean, well, it was Franklin back then. Called Franklin, I mean. Mama said she got word, two or three weeks later, that Papa had been killed by the Apaches on his trip to California, that he had died in a cañon somewhere in New Mexico Territory, that he had died bravely. Everything was in tumult, Mama said, Federal forces moving out, Confederates coming in. Papa had always been a Union man, so Mama moved to Grayson County, in North Texas, to live with her brother and sister-in-law. Her brother, Ephraim Grelle, he was a Union man, too, and there were a lot of Unionists in that part of the state.
That’s where I was born.
Trouble came there, too. Trouble came everywhere in those terrible years. I must have just turned one year old when a bunch of screaming men from the militia stormed into Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Matilda’s house one night. They arrested Uncle Ephraim. Arrested I don’t know how many Union men all over the county, all over North Texas. And then, later, they hanged them. Hanged forty of them, more than forty, maybe as many as fifty, I don’t know. They hanged Uncle Ephraim. Strung them all up on an elm tree in Gainesville after some kind of trial. Well, the Rebels called it a trial. Mama always called it murder. And later, when Little Ephraim ran off…he was maybe fifteen, sixteen, I guess…the Rebels hanged Aunt Matilda, said Little Ephraim was a draft dodger and that they’d hang him, too, if ever they caught him. Said he wasn’t no better than his Yankee-loving pa, and they’d hang the whole lot of us, me included.
So Mama ran off, crying, shattered, made it to Dallas, she said, and then found someone who carried her…us, I mean…down to the Hill Country. Fredericksburg. We didn’t know anybody in town, but there were Union people there, and the Texas Rebs didn’t hound them as much. Didn’t hang them anyway.
Like I said, I was too young at the time to remember any of what happened in Gainesville, or much of anything during the rest of the war. But I do remember Mama, remember her telling me how they didn’t even bury Uncle Ephraim proper, how the hogs rooted out the graves. I remember her sobbing most nights, worrying so that my father had had at least a decent burial. He was a brave man, a good man, would have been a good father. She wanted to know that he was resting in peace, wanted a marble tombstone over his grave, wanted him remembered for posterity, didn’t want him to wind up like Uncle Ephraim and those Rebel hogs.
Mama…she…she died…in July. Don’t feel sorry. It was a blessing, I think. I know it was. A blessing. In many ways she had died when Papa was killed, or at least after all that happened in North Texas back in the autumn of ’Sixty-Two. She was a seamstress, lived in Fredericksburg the rest of her life, never made much money, but she saw to it that I got an education, saw to it that I read the Good Boo
k, saw to it that I remembered my father even if he had died before I came into this world. I was with her when she was called to Glory, holding her hand, telling her that everything would be all right.
And the last thing Mama said to me, she said, was…“See to your Papa, Eleora.”
I owed Mama that much. I owed Papa. If Mama had any money, if she hadn’t been so devastated by Papa’s death and then that…that…that nightmare she lived through…lived through trying to keep me safe, from evil’s clutches, mind you…in Grayson County and Gainesville, or struggling to keep me fed and a roof over my head all those years…why, I remember seeing her fingers bleed, remember her soaking her hands, sore, so sore, from all her hard work. Well, if she had been up to it, hadn’t been saddled with me, I warrant she would have headed West to locate Papa. But she couldn’t.
So I did. Well, tried….
After we buried Mama, after I settled all her affairs, I took what little money we had saved and went to San Antonio, started trying to find out what I could about Papa. It took a few months, took a lot of scouting, reading old newspapers, hunting up old-timers, but I did it. Some old Overland men knew about John James Giddings, sent me to El Paso, then Mesilla, finally Lordsburg. That’s where I met….
Oh, I can’t bear to think about what happened to that poor, poor man.
Thanks, honey. I’ll be all right. Coffee’s strong. Hot. First hot coffee I’ve had since I can’t remember when. I’ve been too scared to light a fire, just that candle every now and then when I’d get real scared. Well…well…anyway, Mister Spoon said he remembered all about Papa. He didn’t know him, never met him, but he knew about that stagecoach the Apaches had hit in April of ’Sixty-One. Twenty years ago. He was freighting supplies to Fort Breckinridge, coming toward Doubtful Cañon, when they discovered the ruins of what once had been a stagecoach station. They found a man there, odd-looking bird, Mister Spoon recalled, who said he had been on the stage heading to California with Mister Giddings. They had arrived, the man had told Mister Spoon, after the attack on the station, found the well poisoned, had buried the men killed by the Indians, then went on. Mister Giddings had to get through, the man had said. But….