The Deliverance

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “In the new world, I will be Mister, not Subject,” he had said, amiably, when anyone asked.

  “Tell me again how she chose me,” Skye said.

  Goddam Murray shrugged. “Indian hoodoo.”

  “I will think about it.”

  “Don’t.”

  Murray pushed the great doors closed, sealing out the savage world and its savage inhabitants, including Standing Alone. He dropped a heavy bar, which fell in its iron slot with a slap.

  “Skye, that was four years ago. That Ute band doesn’t even have the same chief. The trail’s colder than the bottom layer of hell. You could spend the rest of your goddam life going from rancho to hacienda and never find them.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  Murray was annoyed that the Limey even was taking the request seriously. The supper was probably over, and he’d be picking at cold meat.

  Skye didn’t answer. He was peering at the heavens, as if some secret of the universe was about to be unveiled. Murray left them there in the shadowed yard and hastened to the kitchens, peeved at the world. Maybe they should evict Standing Alone. Get rid of her. Tell her to go sit in the bulrushes, but stay a mile from the post. That would do it. The old bat. Costing the post a meal every day, and for what? Because they all felt sorry for her?

  He spat.

  Her story was simple, and old, and known to everyone on the southern plains, Indian and white, Mexican and Yank. Over four years earlier, in the spring of 1837, Standing Alone’s Cheyenne band, led by Black Dog, had come to trade with William Bent, their white brother and protector of their people. They had set up their lodges north of the post in a grassy flat and spent their time lazily dickering away the fine, winter-haired buffalo pelts and dressed robes for all the plunder on Bent’s shelves.

  Then one day, a band of Utes rode in to trade; the two tribes weren’t friends but Bent imposed peace everywhere in the vicinity of his great adobe fortress, so the Utes camped well to the west, leaving a no-man’s-land strip between the tribes. Even so, they got along. Stocky Ute warriors gambled against taller Cheyenne warriors, playing the stick game. The women shyly visited, their nimble fingers making words. The boys swiftly organized war games against each other. The girls traded dolls.

  Each of those breezy spring days, Standing Alone plucked up some good fox or wolf or buffalo skins and wandered happily into the trading room to see what marvels she might have: blue beads, awls, sharp steel knives, jingle bells, keen hatchets, bolts of gingham or flannel, needles and thread, sugar by the pound …

  On this day, the last that the Ute band intended to stay at the post, she had brought her nine-year-old son, Grasshopper, and her twelve-year-old daughter, Little Moon, to the gates.

  Wait, she had said. They would each receive a surprise from their mother. And into the trading store she went to begin the process of turning peltries into little gifts for her children. And even as she whiled away the time, the Utes finished their trading and left.

  Standing Alone could not find her children when she left the post but that didn’t disturb her. They had probably gotten weary of waiting and had gone back to the camp. Hours later, they still were missing. Night fell, and they had not returned. It was only then that she realized, with a chilling wail heard through her village and in every corner of the hushed post, that the Utes, famous stealers of children and slave traders, had stolen her son and stolen her daughter and were long gone.

  three

  Irritably, Skye sawed at a haunch of buffalo and added some boiled maize to his trencher. His mood matched that of the cooks, who were cleaning up when he and Victoria wandered in. Victoria sawed a huge piece of buffalo and scorned the vegetable.

  Skye sat down at a vacant trestle table and Victoria joined him. The last of the engages were mopping up their food. The post’s officers, including Murray, ate separately.

  “That is big damn medicine,” Victoria said, eyeing the bundle.

  Skye didn’t answer. It was nothing but a leather pouch with feathers and pebbles and God knows what else in it. He was feeling trapped. He knew what he had to do. At dawn, he would find Standing Alone and return the thing. If she thought a leather pouch with some totems inside of it committed him to anything, she was mistaken.

  He had no intention of going out to hunt for those children, long gone and probably dead. Northern Mexico was full of Indian slaves, many of them sold to hacendados by the Utes, who made the traffic of human flesh a good business. They abducted children of working age from neighboring tribes and peddled them in Taos for cash. The docile children made good field hands, doomed to hoe and weed and scythe and harvest until they died at a young age from sheer exhaustion. Some ended up in the mines, hauling heavy baskets of ore, fed just enough to keep them going, until they, too, died at a young age, their bones twisted and backs curved.

  Mexican officials averted their eyes; the church also looked elsewhere, upon heavenly vistas. There was wealth in the slave traffic; cheap stoop labor for the haciendas, mines, and plantations. And the wily Utes, in their mountain lair, were the principal suppliers of human flesh.

  Skye pondered all that as he masticated tough and stringy buffalo, which the cooks had scarcely bothered to subdue with fire. Meals for engaged men, hunters, laborers, and others like himself, tended to be perfunctory at best. Men up the ladder ate better here and at any other large western post. Skye remembered the officers and clerks’ meals he had seen, or eaten, at Fort Vancouver, run by the Hudson Bay Company, and Fort Union, the great outpost of American Fur. This was no different.

  No, he wouldn’t go. Not that this post offered him anything but subsistence. He hadn’t advanced and didn’t expect to, not with Barclay the chief factor. Skye’s formidable reputation as a mountaineer mattered little here. His recent experience as a brigade leader counted for naught. His youthful history, however, counted for all too much. But the post offered company, security, food, and comfort. Many were the winter days when he cherished being behind its thick walls, beside a crackling fire. Here he slept in a bunk, defied weather, enjoyed the safety, and got a regular pittance for his troubles. When the beaver trade faded he didn’t know what he would do. Bent had given him his answer.

  No, he wouldn’t leave. Not for some wild-goose chase. Not to track two children lost four years ago, first by heading into the dangerous warrens of the Utes to find out where the children went, and then probably wandering around, illegally, in Mexico, hunting two slaves. And if he did find one or both, getting them out would be still another problem. Hacendados commanded small merciless armies.

  He couldn’t even buy the children’s freedom; he had scarcely ten dollars to his name. The rest had gone to sustain himself, clothe Victoria, and gradually replenish his outfit. But most had gone for aguardiente, Taos Lightning.

  When the Utes had fled Bent’s Fort with the Cheyenne children, William Bent had swiftly organized a pursuit; he and his best men tracked the band for days, only to be defeated by veils of rain and the wily maneuvers of the warrior Utes. He didn’t stop there; William Bent would do anything to help his wife’s people. He had written Governor Armijo of New Mexico, asking that the children be returned. He had posted rewards. The Cheyenne themselves had sallied into Ute fastnesses, all to no avail.

  And then Standing Along began her vigil, and had stood her watches at the gate long before Skye had first set eyes on the post. He had never known a summer season without the sight of her huddled beside the gate.

  What had changed her mind now? He knew the answer to that, at least. She had dreamed it; her spirit guide had ordained it. Her husband had understood, and brought her there in the spring, and returned for her when the geese flew south.

  Victoria was glaring at him. “You gotta go,” she said.

  “For what? I need money.”

  “Because of the bundle.”

  “I’ll return it.”

  “You are dumb.”

  There were
moments when Skye sunk deep into himself, especially when Victoria was needling him, as she was now. He picked stringy buffalo out of his teeth and let her gusts of importuning sail past him.

  He halfway wanted to go; the idea of finding the children and restoring them to their mother appealed to him. The idea of righting a wrong, wreaking trouble on the damnable Utes, stealing them from some heartless and cruel hacendado, delighted him. But most of all, that face of Standing Alone, the suffering in it, the hope in it, the trust and dream, all worked on his heart.

  But all the practical considerations warred against such a quixotic adventure. Money, food, security, clothing, weapons, horses. Why throw all that away?

  Murray was right: don’t even think about it.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Skye said, sullenly.

  Upstairs at Bent’s Fort was the billiard room and saloon. It had started as Bent’s offices, and had evolved into a place for the men at the post to congregate. Amazingly, it had a billiard table dragged out the trail from St. Louis, more than half a thousand miles away. William Bent’s saloon probably soaked up most of the monthly salaries of the post’s men; for a little Taos Lightning, a brandy made of agave leaves, he got his wages back.

  “You’ll get drunk, dammit. You got to be ready to go,” she said.

  He laughed. Soon she would follow him, and together they would drink up half a month’s wage and forget about Standing Alone.

  This evening, in a velvety twilight, as cool air eddied into the second-story saloon, Skye found few men. It was the middle of the week and the middle of the month. But one of those present was William Bent himself, lounging at a table with Goddam.

  “Skye,” Bent said, “let me see that bundle.”

  “You’ve been talking to Murray.”

  “You’d be crazy to go, Skye.”

  “Mister Skye, mate.”

  Bent laughed. The man was actually younger than Skye, but the sheer force of his personality, and his lordship over this amazing castle in the wilds, made him seem ten years older.

  Bent drew an oil lamp close and studied the bundle pending from Skye’s neck. He turned to Murray. “That’s it. I know that one.”

  “What is it?” Skye asked.

  “Owl Woman’s talked about it,” Bent said. “That’s the bundle worn by Strong Runner, keeper of one of the sacred arrows. He was wearing it when he led the famous attack on the Pawnees, who’d stolen the arrow. For my wife’s people, that’s quite a piece of merchandise.”

  Bent talked like that. A sacred item became merchandise.

  “I’m giving it back when the gate opens.”

  Bent smiled. “I would too. That thing obligates you to lead the whole Cheyenne nation. When Strong Runner died, that bundle went to his senior wife, and then it was hung in a special lodge, and after that … I’m not sure. Say, Skye, fetch a dram and sit here. I don’t want you to go on that wild-goose chase, and I’ll list the reasons why.”

  Skye nodded, headed for the bar, where a clerk delivered a dram drawn from a cask and made a notation. Skye knew he was in for more than his next payday would yield; a position the Bents wanted to keep him in.

  Bent sipped, felt the fiery stuff lava down his throat, and settled down beside Bent and Murray. The aguardiente felt just fine, and he sipped again.

  “Skye, first of all, Standing Alone’s crazy. You know that. Secondly, you haven’t a chance of finding that boy and girl. They’re probably a few provinces down, in Sinaloa or Sonora or Chihuahua. The Utes probably traded them off in Taos, but there are half a dozen slavers there who carry the flesh south, deep into Mexico.”

  “Why’d she pick me?”

  Bent shrugged. “Hoodoo.”

  “Why not one of her own?”

  “A Cheyenne can’t do it. He’d be butchered trying to talk to Utes or dealing with Mexicans. It has to be a white man. She elected you. Carson tells me you had something of a reputation up north. That’s why.”

  “Why now?”

  “More hoodoo. They do everything in fours. Sacred number. She waited four years. Her brats didn’t show up. Skye, amigo, that trail’s so cold and those children are so dead you’ll waste a year of your life. And besides, you’re a good hunter and we need you here.”

  “What happens when I return the bundle?”

  Bent sighed, obviously searching for words. “That’s one of the most revered bundles the Cheyenne have. Might be an insult to return it. But make no mistake, she picked you. She got that bundle from her elders or chiefs, and gave it to you. It’s flattering, Skye. That’s honor. That’s a passport, too. You show that to any Cheyenne and you’ll get help.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Who knows? Strong Runner’s totems. It’s not what’s in it, it’s what happened. He got the stolen sacred arrow back from the Pawnees, wearing that thing around his dusky neck.”

  Skye sipped, feeling the heat build in his belly. The damned bundle somehow seized him and he knew what he was going to do, and William Bent wouldn’t like it, and everyone at the post, save for Victoria, would consider him a lunatic. She would just grin.

  But William Bent had the last word: “Skye, don’t do it. I mean it.”

  four

  Skye tossed in his robes that night. He was remembering things he desperately wanted to forget; those years of virtual slavery in the Royal Navy, powerless to live his own life or choose his destiny. He had been pressed into the navy at the age of thirteen, lifted right off the cobbled streets of East London by a press gang. He never saw his family again. He never felt the sweetness of liberty until he jumped ship at Fort Vancouver.

  But most of all, he remembered the cruelty. He remembered being tied to the deck gratings and lashed with a cato’ -nine-tails until his back ran with his own blood. He remembered being brutally beaten by boatswains. He remembered being robbed of porridge by older seamen; being reduced to a starving bundle of muscles subdued to the will of ’tween-decks tyrants and captains.

  He wallowed in his bunk, remembering the brutal punishment every time he protested, the despair, the hopelessness of ever living his own life, the prison of the forecastle, the desolation that he meant no more to others than useful muscle and bone.

  He remembered how they took away even his pittance as punishment for imagined infractions, so he was not only a slave, but without a pence to his name.

  Many was the night, lying in his hammock in the forecastle, that he would gladly have jumped overboard and given himself to the sea but for some glimmering sense that he was not alone; somewhere, God hovered, offering hope. And yet it hadn’t all been bad. He remembered the dolphins sporting in the green sea, the strange tropical shores, the seamen’s hornpipes and rough humor, their pride in their skills. He remembered the breathtaking views of the endless gray seas from the crow’s nest as it swayed to the tides. But all that was part of a life not chosen or desired.

  Out of that seven-year ordeal was born in him a loathing of slavery that ran so deep and fierce that he despised every form of it, from the indenture of pressed seamen in the navies of the world, to the wage peonage and perpetual debt that bound a man to his creditor, to convict labor, to the obscene slavery of black men that stained and tarnished the American South. In every case, people were being used; human beings were forcibly denied their right to live their own lives. In every case, the oppressed lived in hopelessness and sorrow.

  And so he thrashed in his bunk until Victoria slipped over to him in the darkness and placed a small, cool hand on his forehead.

  “It is a bad night,” she said.

  Skye came fully awake at once, and all the dark phantasms slithered away. He clasped that small hand and held it.

  “Bad dreams,” he said.

  “Dreams? You were asleep?”

  “Memories, then. When I was a sailor.”

  She had heard of all these horrors. “Aiee, it is bad to think of that.”

  “Can’t help it.”

  He felt her hands on him
, comforting him, sending messages of love and grace to him.

  “No master commands you,” she said.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Only in your thoughts.”

  “You want to go after those children? Go on the wild-goose chase?”

  “What is this, a wild-goose chase?”

  “A foolish quest. A futile effort.”

  “If it makes you think such bad memories, maybe we shouldn’t.”

  “If I go, it’s because of those memories. If those children are still alive, they’re probably slaves in Mexico. That’s what the Utes do. Sell them into slavery. They would be down there somewhere, being ruined, hopeless, denied happiness, used and used and used and used until they die.”

  “Let’s go, Skye.” Her voice was urgent.

  He pulled her to him until her head nestled into the hollow of his shoulder. He liked that; liked sharing life with her.

  “You opposed to slavery so much? Your people got slaves.”

  “It’s for her. Standing Alone.”

  She pitied the woman even if she was Cheyenne. He did too, but not so much. She was free to do what she wanted. It was the two captive children whose fate stirred him.

  “We have different reasons,” he said.

  “Not so different.”

  “It’s a stupid thing to do. No money in it.”

  “Skye, you are so damned dumb.”

  He laughed. She always did that to him when he was being buffalo-witted. “I’ll talk to Bent in the morning. We’ve got problems from the get-go.”

  “Like what?”

  “We can’t even talk to Standing Alone. Except in signs. How’s she going to tell us anything? We need someone with us who knows Cheyenne.”