"I'm not leaving my brother!" Chance shouted back.
"Wait!" Monahan yelled, moving his massive body from the platform and splashing toward the three men left behind in the tunnel. With a mighty heave he picked up the dead weight and, pausing only the briefest moment to steady himself, hoisted Hart over his shoulder.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" breathed Shaughnessy in awe; a two-hundred-and-seventy-pound burden would have flattened any two men. "Fer Christ's sake, move yer asses!"
Somehow all ten men crowded onto the rickety platform and began the precarious ascent to the top, praying the ancient cable and winch would hold.
Below, the steaming water swirled and bubbled as Mother Nature reclaimed the shaft for her mountain.
Chapter 77
The doctors said the men would be scarred for life by the suppurating blisters that had risen from their scalding, but Fancy, frenzied as a Fury, banished the medical men and called on every herbal remedy she knew to save them. She immersed both brothers in tubs of linseed oil and limewater, and dispatched one rider to Magda, and another to fetch Wu for consultation.
Like one possessed, she nursed the two men through the next fortnight, sleeping only when Magda bullied her into napping to keep her strength from failing. Together, the three herbalists pulled both McAllisters back to life, unscarred, except within their hearts at the irreparable loss of Bandana.
Chance recovered first, for his injuries were less severe, but Hart slipped in and out of coma for a week. He thought of his own nakedness at times, as Fancy's competent hands smoothed calendula and hypericum salves and unpronounceable Chinese unguents onto his damaged flesh, but he was far too weak to feel anything but comfort in the caress of her fingers. Was there anything we three haven't shared? he wondered somewhere in his delirium. Where does one kind of love end, and another begin? Friendship, family ties, passion, debts of honor... wasn't it all there, endlessly entwining them, so there was no clear line of demarcation anymore? They would die for each other... was there any surer test of devotion?.... they just couldn't figure out how to live with each other. But it was all too complicated for the sick man to unravel. Sometimes the complications seemed to sort themselves out in his delirium, but the answers would fade again with consciousness—like a dream that has clarity on the moment of awakening, then dissolves against your will, so that hard as you try, you can never, ever bring it back into focus.
Chapter 78
McBain's will survived the ordeal in its oilskin pouch, and Hart knew that the time must come to give Bandana's gift to Fancy. She grieved hard for his loss. "If I had only one friend left..." she'd written in that letter long ago; the words had stayed in Hart's mind for he'd wished they'd been written of him.
On a morning in September, when the time had come for him to leave again, he took Fancy aside and held her hand in his own. "Bandana gave me something for you, babe," he said, and saw the glint of quick moisture glisten her dark eyes, but she simply nodded.
Fancy looked less robust now than when Hart had gotten off the stage a month before; was it the sleepless nights of nursing or the grief that had sapped her?
"There's a place we should go to, Hart. It was Bandana's favorite spot in the world, you'll see why. He called it the Rainy Day."
Fancy and Hart dismounted near the entrance to the small mine tunnel. They hadn't said a word along the trail, for they both knew they'd come to say good-bye not only to Bandana, but to each other as well.
The wounds that had existed between Fancy and Chance had been mended by his brush with death; they would try again to be man and wife. And all three who loved each other knew it would be best if Hart were not around.
The big man pointed upward silently and Fancy shaded her eyes to see an eagle sail in lazy circles above the foothills far to the east. It reminded her of Fan. Autumn haze silvered the skyline, and the sheen of mist made all that lay below seem more an inland sea than a valley. Fancy breathed in the crisp fall damp and found that the earthy scent of fallen leaves and winter moss was soothing.
"Isn't it strange, Hart? Other people go home to heal, I take to the hills...."
"Maybe the wilderness is the only real home you ever had, babe," he replied.
They hitched their horses and walked to the edge of the old shaft; their footsteps crunched the apricot-colored leaves carpeting the trail. It was a soft, scuffling sound like the rustling of a small animal in a woodpile.
"I'm going to miss him so much, Hart. Even when Bandana took to the hills, I always knew I could find him if I needed to. We used to come here often just to talk about life. It wasn't that he had all the answers, you know, just that he made me feel my questions were the right ones."
Hart reached into the pocket of his buckskin jacket and silently handed her Bandana's legacy. Fancy unfolded the letter and read it through silently. When she was done, she passed it wordlessly to Hart and he could see that tears overflowed her eyes and streaked her cheeks.
"Fance, old friend," Hart read...
Well, I found her, just like I said I would. And now she's yours. Near as I can figure, Esmeralda's about as rich as they come, so you'll never want for bean money—those lean days that always scared you so bad are gone for good now.
There's a catch to it, though, so I'm afraid you'll have to hear me out.
You're headstrong as they come, Fance. Don't give me no arguments now, that's just the way it is. And Chance is a gambler. Put them two natures together and you got trouble.
I ain't so old I cain't see what's what, so here's my stipulation: You cain't sell the Rainy Day (that's Esmeralda's last name in case you ain't figgered it out by now) 'cause it's our special place, and you cain't give Esmeralda to Chance McAllister or any other husband who might come down the pike.
Other than that, she's yours to do with as you will. But I leave you one thought to go with her.
Mining's a real clean game, Fance. You take your money outten the earth, where it never belonged to nobody else but God Almighty. So it's new, never tainted by nothing at all, till man gets hold of it and greed sets in. That's when everything changes for the worse.
Esmeralda will give you the wherewithal to get anything you want out of this life, so you got to choose what you want real careful.
I never could figger out what kind of love I had for you, Fance. Father, uncle, friend seemed possibilities. Maybe I even loved you in the same way them boys did, though I never would of said a word about that, 'cause you had enough trouble sorting out two, never mind three.
All I know is I love you an almighty lot and I want to see you happy.
Well, I guess that's all the personal part I got to say, the rest's for them lawyer fellers:
This here note is my last will and testament. I'm of sound mind, near as I kin figger. Anything I got I leave to Fancy McAllister, not to her husband. The Rainy Day claim was mine fair and square; now it's hers.
Signed: Otis McBain
P.S. Hart McAllister witnessed this here document, so anybody got a quarrel about it should see him. I trust him to do right by this testament 'cause I know for a fact he thinks about as highly of the Ten Commandments as Moses did.
Fancy looked around her, unable to speak. She saw through her tears that the trees still stood as God had planted them, the land was untrammeled by machinery, the leaf-blanket softened even the cavelike hole Bandana had dug with his own hands, and graced the rotting timbers of the entranceway with a mantle of auburn.
No wonder he'd brought her here so often, just to sit and talk; he'd planned this all along. This here place will keep you safe and warm, darlin', if there's ever a rainy day, he'd told her once, and she'd thought he meant it only as a refuge. Her voice was a whisper.
"If I tell the world what's buried here, Hart, you know what will happen?"
Hart loved her so achingly in that moment, he did what he'd sworn he wouldn't do. He put his arms around her shoulders from behind and she leaned back against his chest and felt the protectiven
ess of his strength enfold her like a mantle.
"Barren mountainside," he answered, "trees gone to mine-timber, tailing dumps of slag draining down the mountain like an open wound."
"You've always been the one who understood it all, haven't you, Hart?" she said wistfully, but he didn't reply.
"I've got all the money I could ever need. I've got Chance back again... maybe that rainy day will never come."
Hart thought he could read her mind, he felt so attuned to her; or maybe it was simply that they shared the same history, so their thoughts ran together like mountain streams.
"Why not just do what Bandana said, babe... save her, just in case. Don't tell anyone at all."
Fancy stood very still for a while within the shelter of his arms, feeling the pounding of his heart within his great chest, feeling the safety of his love that asked nothing in return. Then she pulled away and walked as close to the edge of the mountain as she could and stretched out her arms, like one in prayer.
"I love you, Bandana!" Her voice echoed up and down the canyon between the mountains, bouncing and trailing off into the distance. "Thank you for everything!"
"Rest gently, Bandana," Hart murmured quietly beside her, the sound mingling with the lingering echoes of her cry upon the wind.
"I guess this is good-bye for us, too, isn't it, Hart?" Fancy asked, letting her eyes linger on his, an act of intimacy. She saw nothing there but love and goodness.
"I don't think there'll ever be good-bye for us, babe," he replied.
The two remounted and followed the winding trail back down the mountain.
Hart did something surprising before he left Leadville; he asked his brother to liquidate his holdings in the mines and wire his share of the money to Rut Canfield's family bank in Savannah. There were certain investments he had in mind, he said, and he wanted Rut to handle his money for the foreseeable future. Hart's lack of confidence in his business ability hurt Chance, but he loved his brother too much to argue.
Hart had decided not to go to Paris to study after all. He'd made the change in plans in the mine and in the weeks of convalescence after. He was no longer immortal; life was short and every day precious. Fancy and Chance were together, and he was again the odd man out—both these revelations made college seem a pale imitation of life, more a distraction to his art than a necessity. The decision to do, instead of think, was cleansing. He would make his way southwest into Indian territory and fulfill the dream fostered by his father so many years before. He had no way of knowing how long he'd be gone.
A letter arrived shortly thereafter, telling Fancy and Chance that Hart would leave within the month to travel on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe train as far as it would take him into the Arizona Territory. From there, he would travel on horseback toward the Apache Nation. Catlin had painted the Sioux; Bodmer, the Iroquois; but no one had yet chronicled the fierce Apache, and that was Hart's intent. Chance wondered out loud worriedly if it was Hart's way of committing suicide, but Fancy knew that far from wanting to die, this was Hart's way of showing them how very much he wanted to live.
PART IX: CANDLE IN THE WIND
Hart Apacheria
"A friend is one mind in two bodies."
Bandana McBain
Chapter 79
The high country had begun to subside into low red sandy wasteland and risen again into barren mountains, before the melancholy ebbed in Hart.
The land south of Colorado was new to him, benevolent and strange as a moonscape. Blue-green misted mountains, with clouds lying puddled on their summits, ringed the 360 degrees of his vision; mighty mesas, chiseled out by passing glaciers in an age forgotten, stood like sentinels in deserts God had painted shades of rust and copper, mauve and tan.
Hart crossed the desert, awakening to its subtle wonder, and wormed his way through canyons thick with brush or cotton-wood. He drew all that he saw, and eventually the distracting pain of loss he always felt on leaving Fancy faded to an ache, and the newness of the world around him began to fire his imagination.
He had no idea where he was headed, or what he would find when he got there, and for some unfathomable reason, he didn't fear the Indians nearly as much as he should have. The few towns he passed through were full of stories of Apache raids; Geronimo's war with the army had left much of the Southwest a bloodied battlefield, but Hart had dreamed this journey too long to be deterred, and his brush with death had made him curiously bold.
He'd taken on the old ways for this trek; it was good to be dressed in buckskin again, good to be forced to rely on himself. "Ability to stand alone is the measure of a man, son," his father had said, and Hart understood in his soul that this was true. He'd carefully packed art supplies in New Haven and picked up trade goods along the route, so he thought himself as well equipped as any man could be who wasn't certain where he was going. George Catlin's autobiography of his time with the Sioux and Cheyenne had become his bible; the man had lived among the Plains Indians for years and shared their rituals as well as painting them, so Hart saw no reason he couldn't do the same with the tribes that roamed the Southwest. The Apaches fascinated him more than the Hopi or Navaho, for their warrior feats were legendary, and if the army's policy was successfully carried out, the way of the warrior would soon vanish from the earth. They were the best and bravest, they deserved to be remembered.
The utter loneliness challenged him, let him listen to thoughts long drowned out by the drone of life. Self-reliance tempers a man and strips him down to the essentials of character. Just before sundown one evening, he camped on the lonesome side of an arroyo; an exotic desert plant had caught his eye and he'd dismounted to examine it and found, when he stretched his legs, that it was time to stop for the night. Listening to the quiet had become a sustaining pleasure; he began to prepare himself for another evening alone with a book by the fire, when a disquieting sound disrupted his reverie. A moan or a chant, it was sung by a human voice, but he'd never heard one so primitive, mournful, or compelling. Hart crept to the canyon's ledge to track the source.
Below him was an Indian who was neither tall nor young. Hart thought he might be Apache, by the authority written clearly in the man's aspect. His jaw was square as a lantern, grayed black hair framed a face of indeterminate age and, Hart thought, full of suffering. His lips were no more than a slash of rigid thinness and his eyes were the kind a man doesn't forget easily. Black, haunted, ancient eyes.
Commanding muscles rippled in arm, shoulder, leg, so perfected by feats of strength and endurance that Hart could see each muscle group like a page from Gray's Anatomy. There was a slash of yellow paint on each high cheekbone and he was naked except for a breechcloth. Some mournful ritual had so engrossed his attentions that he neither heard nor saw the artist watching him. The Indian had come to this place to grieve or mourn, Hart guessed from his expression, and, having entered into some kind of ritual trance state, to communicate with his gods.
The watcher made his way, quiet as the grave, back to his horse; he slipped a sketch pad and charcoal from his saddlebag, and crept back to his vantage point on the ledge, to sketch the man, the place, the majesty of the moment, until dusk made further work impossible. Drawings clutched in his hand, he made his way back to the horse, but in the gathering dark he stumbled over a rock and nearly fell. It was a tiny sound, just enough to tell the Indian he was there, or perhaps the ritual had ended and the man's senses had become acute again. Hunting knife in hand, he was before Hart on the trail, in the time it took the white man to pull his rifle from its saddle scabbard.
There are suspended moments in a life when a small decision changes everything forever. Some instinct took hold of Hart; instead of cocking the Winchester, he dropped it on the ground beside him and stood, arms raised before the redskin's knife. The Apache hesitated, uncertain, and Hart quickly made the Indian hand-sign for peace that his pa had showed him when he was a boy.
Hart saw the man's eyes, cold, deadly, wary, move in that instant of indecis
ion, from him to the sketches on the ground; he wondered if the Apache, like the Sioux, thought their souls were captured when their likeness was drawn.
Eyes fixed on the sketches and on Hart, the Indian inched forward soundlessly. Heartened at not being dead yet, the white man tried to sign again, but the redskin cut his explanation with a vicious gesture that said "Enough!" Then, without another action, he was gone, melted into the trees and crevices as if he'd never been there. It took the hair on the nape of Hart's neck several minutes to lie back down in its accustomed place.
Hart stood very still for a long moment, knowing, unequivocally, the Apache could have killed him if he'd chosen to. He thought he probably outweighed the brave by damn near a hundred pounds and topped him by a foot, but when a man faces eyes like those he sees his doom.
He slept none too well the next few nights, not out of fear but because an excited anticipation tingled his blood. A week went by, as he rode farther and farther from the white man's world; he felt certain at times that he was watched by unseen eyes, but there seemed nothing to do but travel on.
Eight days after his first encounter with the Apache, their paths crossed again, almost as if God were pointing the two men at each other. Hart had camped near a water hole and was out on foot hunting dinner, when he heard the guttural snarl of a big cat in mortal combat. The solitary Apache was rolling and tumbling on the ground, doing his damnedest to slice his hunting knife into the gut of a mountain lion who seemed near as determined to have Indian for dinner. They seemed a fairly even match to Hart, until he spied the lion's mate scrambling down the rocks for a little reinforcement. He plugged the new arrival with a neat shot from his Colt, and the sharp report of the gun startled the wrestling lion just enough to give advantage to the Indian so he could slit its throat. Two deft strokes and the female cat pumped all her remaining blood onto the sand; the Apache pushed the big predator off, and leapt easily to his feet facing his benefactor. Once again, he and Hart stood man to man, one with a still-smoking gun, the other with a knife dripping cat-gore on the desert floor. Locked in the grip of each other's eyes, the two remained for a long, breathless moment.
Paint the Wind Page 54