The Deliverance

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “How do that?” Victoria signaled.

  In truth, Standing Alone had no idea. “Talk your man,” she signaled. “He know. Don’t tell fat man.”

  Victoria nodded and caught up with the others. The man in the white suit was pointing into the yellow pit at the swarm of men loading gravel into baskets, staggering up wobbling ladders, and pausing to catch their breath at the top.

  Grief bloomed in her. Was that how her son had spent his last breaths, staggering under weight that bent him double? Was he alone, with no one to share his ordeal? Did he yearn for his people, and the tallgrass prairies, and the summer winds? Did he see the boneyards, and know he would soon be scattered across them, bits and pieces of himself whitening in the cruel sun?

  Did he feel his medicine had been taken away? That he would bring no honor to the People? That he would win no girl of the People, no war honors, no admiration of the People? That he would have no reputation as a warrior? Aiee, his life was like midnight.

  There was a tautness in the air. Something was going to happen and she didn’t know what.

  She saw Victoria whispering to Skye, and saw him listen intently. He looked strange in his humble clothes. Victoria left Skye and fell back to where Standing Alone walked.

  “He says big trouble.”

  “I want those Arapaho boys.”

  “Skye says, maybe there is a way. But he don’t know it. It would take money.”

  “I will give them to my people!”

  Victoria shook her head. “Skye got taken away long ago and never saw his people again. He’s not gonna help you give Arapaho boys to the Cheyenne. If he helps you, they will go home to the Arapaho.”

  A great rage built in her. She glared sullenly at Skye’s woman, who was nothing but an Absaroka.

  The wheeling vultures flapped into the field of bones again, and she knew they were feasting on the dead. She wanted to get out; if she could not take those two boys with her, then she was through with this place, and through with Mexico. Her work was done. She had her daughter.

  They were gathering now around the black carriage. The man in the white suit was smiling but his eyes were cold. They were talking, but she didn’t grasp any of it.

  “What are they saying?” she asked Victoria by sign.

  “The man Hector Ramon O’Grady is saying that it takes much labor to make gold, and he has many mouths to feed, and Indians are poor workers, and he does not get rich.”

  “Are we going now?”

  “Soon. They are saying adios.”

  Standing Alone watched the hawkish man, and suddenly she knew what she must do. She raced up to him, and the words flooded out in her native tongue, Cheyenne, and she could not think of anything else.

  “Take me and let those Arapaho boys go. I am strong. I am twice as strong as those boys. Take me so the boys can live. You bought them but I will do more work for you. I will carry more stone up the ladders. Take me! I am a Cheyenne and strong and I will make gold for you!”

  The Mexican man O’Grady stared, and finally turned to Skye.

  “You have any idea what the woman wants?”

  Skye shook his head.

  O’Grady turned to Victoria. “You understand her?”

  “A little.”

  Standing Alone tried again, slow, her voice piercing, her fingers making words. “You take me. I work hard. I am better than two little boys! You trade me for them. Boys go with the carriage! I give myself to you. I do twice as much as they do!”

  She stared at their faces, seeing the blankness in them. The curse of language was walling her off.

  “I think she wants to trade herself for them boys you got over there,” Victoria said.

  The man in white studied Standing Alone. “She wants to trade herself? She’s not worth two strong boys.”

  Standing Alone somehow understood, her small grasp of this English tongue giving her understanding.

  She knelt before this man in white and clutched his leg, and wept, the hot tears rising from her eyes and flooding her face with her sorrow.

  He kicked and tugged, and finally booted her free.

  “Out!” he said. “Get the squaw out.”

  forty-eight

  Skye helped the trembling Cheyenne woman into the calash, filled with pity and horror. Hector Ramon O’Grady was a swine.

  “Wait,” said the mayordomo. He stared at her, assessing her body as if she were a draft horse. “Some savage women are strong. Tell her to get out and stand.”

  “Leave her alone,” Skye said.

  But the mine superintendent held out his claw to her, and she took it and stepped down to the sun-baked clay. He walked around her, assessing, boldly examining her arms, her shoulders, her wiry legs. She stared defiantly, her gaze never leaving him.

  “I’ll trade her for one boy,” he said. He turned to Victoria. “Tell her.”

  Victoria simply lifted one finger.

  Standing Alone understood, straightened herself, and held up two fingers.

  O’Grady thrust up one finger. “Tell her she can choose.”

  He turned to one of his muscular capataces, addressing him in Spanish. The man trotted toward the kitchen area, where the Arapaho boys waited.

  “Señores, boys that young are almost worthless to me. I offered very little. They achieve little. They won’t ever work off their indenture.” He shrugged sadly. “No one else wanted them. I pitied them.”

  “Indenture,” Skye said, knowing there was such loathing in his voice that O’Grady wouldn’t miss his contempt.

  “Would you care to work for me, Mister Skye? Actually, I pay well for brute labor, more than it’s worth to feed and house these animals. You would be useful here.”

  It was a smoothly phrased threat, but Skye ignored it. “I saw black slaves in Missouri, and they were decently fed and clothed,” Skye said. “I’ll say that much for the Americans.”

  “We don’t have slaves here.”

  O’Grady’s capataz prodded the two Arapaho boys forward. Skye was shocked. One seemed barely nine or ten; the other a little older. They still wore the yellow-dyed loincloths and moccasins of their people, but that would last only days in rough rock.

  Standing Alone studied the children; they watched her solemnly, their black eyes alive with fear. She pointed at the smaller one, the moonfaced boy who was half grown and far from possessing the bone and muscle of a man.

  She spoke to Victoria in that patois of theirs.

  Victoria translated: “Let this one go; give the other one an easy task, and I will trade myself.”

  Skye hated this trafficking in human flesh. He could scarcely bear to witness this brave woman’s sacrifice.

  Hector O’Grady nodded. So it was done.

  Standing Alone spoke volubly to the boys, wanting desperately to say something to both of them even if her tongue was not theirs; and then to Victoria.

  Victoria said, “She’s saying that she wants the Arapaho boy to be given to her people, learn Cheyenne ways, but if the boy don’t want to stay, he gets to go back to his people.”

  Standing Alone nodded.

  So it had come to that. Skye thought back to the time at Bent’s Fort when this woman had sought his help to find and free a Cheyenne boy and a girl. Now she would take the place of one, and her life would be short and hard.

  “Grandmother,” said Skye, “you won’t understand my English words, but let the respect in my voice touch you. You are giving your life away, not for your son but for someone very much like him, that this boy might grow strong and come into his glory. I have never known a more beautiful and sad sacrifice. May you live forever in the memory of your people, and all people. I will carry your image inside of me.”

  O’Grady gestured. The capataz started to hustle the luckless older boy away. Skye watched the boy sag and stare at the yellow clay.

  Standing Alone slowly approached the calash, where Little Moon sat rigid in her seat. She reached out to her daughter, smiled, touched
her child’s face, wiped her jet hair away from her eyes, and whispered things not meant for other ears. Tears slid down Little Moon’s amber cheeks. Standing Alone whispered furiously, conveying instructions, requests, a hundred things, no doubt including a farewell to her husband, all of which rested now in the heart of the daughter she had found and rescued.

  Standing Alone looked utterly beautiful.

  “Damn it all,” said Victoria. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

  Standing Alone helped the Arapaho boy slide into the calash and settle beside Little Moon. Childress for once looked overwrought.

  Hector Ramon O’Grady took Standing Alone by the arm. “A pleasure to show you our operation,” he said to Skye.

  “And a word of advice, señor. Drive straight through Santa Fe. If the governor gets wind of you, he might reclaim his property.”

  “His property,” muttered Skye.

  O’Grady smiled. “Señor, you will thank me for the advice.”

  Skye watched the burly capataz herd Standing Alone away, until they disappeared in a distant adobe shack. The world somehow seemed smaller and harsher without her in it. Standing Alone had been like a pillar reaching the heavens.

  “Ah, Skye, Sah, we’d better be off,” Childress said nervously.

  Skye slowly lifted the carriage weight and clambered to his seat in the creaking rig. He collected the lines in his rough hands and slapped them over the croups of the trotters, and slowly the calash circled away and a few minutes later a bluff hid the mine from sight.

  Even Childress looked unusually somber. A great quietness fell upon them all, as visions of Standing Alone, courageous warrior woman of her people, filtered through their minds.

  They had almost reached Dolores when Childress suddenly cried out. “I say, where is Shine?”

  The monkey was not with them.

  “Turn around, turn around,” he bawled.

  Skye found a flat where he could wheel the carriage around and collect Childress’s rascally simian, and they slowly wended their way back to the mine as the sun was sinking.

  A few minutes later they rode once again into the mining compound, and Skye headed up the slope to the building that housed the administration.

  O’Grady emerged at once and stood waiting, while his segundos filtered out.

  “We’re missing the monkey,” Skye said.

  “Yes, he’s here,” O’Grady said. “There’s his head.”

  There was Shine’s little head swaying on a stake off to the side, its eyes lifeless, its lips opened forever.

  “We do that to all thieves,” O’Grady said. “It sets an example. Every once in a while a worker takes a notion to steal some gold. This is our response.”

  Childress groaned. The grinning head swayed on its crimsoned gibbet.

  “Feisty little fellow. Hard to catch, but we caught him red-handed. Gold ingot in his little hairy hand. Pity, Skye. Too bad it wasn’t a cigar.”

  Skye landed on the ground.

  The mayordomo stepped back. “Touch me, you’ll die,” he said.

  “All right, I will die.”

  He bounded into O’Grady and slammed him hard, knocking him down. Skye hammered the mayordomo, feeling his fists mash into the man’s thin frame, feeling the air whoof from the man’s lungs, feeling the man’s teeth loosen in his jaw, feeling the bright light of justice in every blow.

  But then the capataces landed on him, two, three, five, snaring his thrashing arms, yanking him off the jefe, kicking, jabbing, gouging. They pinioned his arms and returned his punches, booted him in the privates, doubled him over until he lay on the clay, puking, coughing, and even then they kicked him hard, tormenting his ribs.

  O’Grady picked himself up, breathing hard. “Mean fists, Skye. I should make you one of my jefes.” The man wiped blood from his nostrils. He turned and spat.

  Then he snapped something in Spanish, and the burly foremen threw Skye onto the calash and slapped the horses. The carriage lurched. Skye wiped blood from his lips, seized the lines, and slowed the careening calash.

  Childress sat moaning, his tear-streaked face buried in his hands.

  They rode down the canyon and no one followed.

  He felt Victoria’s gentle hands dabbing at his face from behind, cleansing him, strengthening him.

  He kept the trotters to a walk, not wanting to wear them out. He needed the cloak of darkness in Santa Fe, and that meant staying on the move if the horses could endure.

  They passed through Dolores again, and no one stopped them. Below, he rested the trotters and let them graze on a patch of grass as twilight deepened.

  Not a word was spoken all that while.

  He studied the two Indians, the girl silent and somber and tear-streaked, the boy wide-eyed and wary. Victoria had clothed them in her love, and now they nestled into her, on either side. As always, the barriers of tongue prevented talking.

  “Shine deserves the Order of the Garter,” Childress said.

  “I thought you were a Galveston Bay privateer.”

  “That, too,” said Childress.

  forty-nine

  Skye kept the trotters to a quiet walk, conserving their strength. Childress slumped numbly, watching the hills unfold as the calash rocked northward over a rutted road. Victoria sat across from him, the young Indians on either side, each nestled into her for comfort. She was a reassuring presence to them, the one native person they had with them.

  The trader quietly studied the young people. The girl, Little Moon, was composed, though he supposed her thoughts were back there at the mine with the mother she had seen for only a few hours; the blessed mother who had, after four years, come for her, found her, set her free. The most beautiful of all mothers. Little Moon now had her life before her, and would rejoin her people, marry, raise proud Cheyenne, and might well prepare all her people for the new world that was encroaching on traditional Cheyenne life.

  The boy was more of an enigma. He had spoken his name this afternoon and pointed to himself, but no one could translate it. Ouo, he had said of himself. The meaning would have to wait. Skye would find out the name at Bent’s Fort, where many knew the tongue, including Kit Carson, whose wife was Arapaho. Ouo was trying hard to be manly, to be a warrior, to be an Arapaho, and often he looked sternly about. He would become all of these now; at the mine he would have become only weary muscle and empty dreams and faded hopes. But sometimes Ouo looked ready to bury himself in Victoria’s arms. Childress wondered whether it was all too late. The Arapaho might not yet know it, but their life would change as settlement progressed, and maybe they would die off, diseased and devastated.

  Was it worth it? Yes, Childress thought. It had all been worth it. Little Moon was free. Ouo was free. Each could live the lives they might choose to live. And Childress had found out what he wanted to know.

  But there was one who was no longer free, and Childress thought of her now. No doubt they had put her right to work, and even now, in the last light, she would be carrying terrible burdens trip after trip. From this day forward, her life would no longer be her own. And yet she had chosen it so that the boy nodding beside Victoria in this black coach might receive a life.

  Childress studied the slumped back of Mister Skye, knowing the man hurt from his beating at the hands of the mine’s ruffians, knowing also that without Skye’s indomitable courage and strength, this strange rescue would not have happened. It might yet be thwarted if the governor had troops out looking for them.

  Skye had begun this venture not for money, but to help a suffering woman, and her suffering children. That alone set him apart from the run of men. Childress loved the man for his courage and his honor and his artless integrity, and loved his wife, too, the perfect mate for a man of the mountains who scorned the wiles of civilization.

  No one had spoken a word. No one wanted to. Childress knew that everything had changed, somehow. His work here was over, and he must wind this business up and make his report. His name was not really Childr
ess; neither was it Jean Lafitte or Sir Arthur. Neither was he an agent of the Republic of Texas, though his crew of traders at his post on the Arkansas River believed he was.

  All those things had been camouflage, just as his gaudy cart, bizarre conduct, and startling dress had been camouflage, enabling him to probe where he wanted to probe, see what he wanted to see.

  The monkey had been camouflage too, and now the monkey was dead, and everything had changed. He had loved that spider monkey, and grieved its sudden cruel death as if he had lost a son or a brother. That monkey had accompanied him for years, achieving what he could not achieve, sustaining him in bad moments, as if the monkey had a human intelligence, knew what needed to be done, and achieved it without even being asked.

  Ah, Shine! Childress pushed that final image out of his mind and tried to focus on the graceful juniper-blanketed slopes around him, but there was only emptiness now. None of them, not Skye, not Victoria, not the Indian youngsters, would ever know what that little rascal had meant to him.

  A chapter had ended. There were things to do now, in this darker, meaner world.

  Skye rested and grazed the horses at a much-used spring as the slip of moon rose, bathing this land with a ghostly glow, almost phosphorescent. The scent of piñon pine sweetened the air. Victoria let the youngsters stretch their legs. Childress lumbered to the hard earth.

  “Say, Mister Skye, we should talk a little.”

  Skye nodded.

  “What time will we make Santa Fe?” Childress asked.

  “Two, three hours. It’ll still be dark.”

  “I’ll be saying good-bye to you there.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “We’ve done what we could. You’ll be heading out the Santa Fe Trail, back to Bent’s Fort. I’ll be going north to my post on the Arkansas. But we’ve some business to transact. I’ll outfit you.”

  “Outfit us? With what?”

  “This rig. It’s worth plenty. We’ll go see the American consul, Alvarez, most pleasant chap.”

  “I already owe him.”

  “Trust me. There’s enough in this rig to put the four of you on horses and outfit you, too.”