Wolves of Eden

by Kevin McCarthy

  5

  November 12, 1866—​Post of Omaha, Nebraska Territory

  LIKE ANY CAVALRY MAN, HE CLAIMS HE CAN SLEEP IN the saddle but this is a stupor more than sleep, a pale purgatory of half-​consciousness and in its thrall, Molloy dreams of the boy, of a Tennessee river town that for five days would not surrender.

  “Sir?”

  Molloy starts and his mount feels it through the saddle, the streak of fear charging through her master, and this unsettles her and she snorts and shakes her mane. The Indian takes the mare’s ear between his fingers and rubs and squeezes it until she settles. The mare eyes the Indian and wills her master to wake, her eyeballs wide in their sockets. She too dreams of the war sometimes and twitches in her stall, her legs pumping, pumping in her sleep, galloping.

  Molloy’s heartbeat runs hard in his chest and, though he cannot remember his dream, he knows of what he has been dreaming. He dreams of nothing else.

  “Kohn, Corporal Kohn.” His voice is weak. He clears his throat. They have traveled only as far as the loafer camp just outside the main gates of the Post of Omaha and Molloy is shaken to discover how briefly he’s been asleep. He blinks and gazes in surprise at the tipis and drying frames hung with strips of goat and buffalo meat. At dogs in the dust. An Indian woman wrapped in a shawl splintering crates for firewood. “What is it, Kohn, for the love of God?”

  “Sir, this is Jonathan. He’s the scout we’ve been recommended by the adjutant.”

  Molloy turns to the rider stroking his mare’s ear. “An Indian scout for Indian country.”

  “Something like that,” Kohn says.

  “He’s a Pawnee. A real, goddamn Wolf Pawnee,” Rawson says.

  “Jonathan is a queer name for a Pawnee, is it not?” Molloy says.

  The Indian holds Molloy’s gaze and there is perhaps the hint of a smile at his lips. His hair is shorn to a stripe down the center of his skull with the top of the stripe dyed bright red. Four black tattooed lines run from his lower lip down his chin and he wears a buttonless blue army tunic open over a breastplate of beads and bear claws. Two bandoliers of conical rifle and pistol rounds cross his chest. He sits, on a cavalry saddle that is much worn, on the back of a brown and white pony four hands shorter, at least, than Molloy’s cavalry mount. He wears two Colt pistols in a sash of blue cloth tied around his waist and a Spencer repeater rests in a scabbard strapped to his saddle. Nine cured scalps hang from the buffalo hide shield strapped to his back with leather ties.

  Kohn says, “He won’t tell his Indian name to whites. Says we can’t pronounce it properly. The adjutant told me that. I’ve paid him half his wages up front from your purse, sir.”

  Molloy waves this fact away. “Why . . . ” His lips are parched and he wets them with his tongue. He pulls the cork from his canteen, drinks and winces. “Why do we need an Indian scout, pray tell, Kohn? Surely the trail north is well enough marked.”

  “Well, I imagine he’ll be able to spot any hostiles on the trail. Ambushes and the like. The Sioux and the Cheyenne are huffy, sir, about the railroad and all the travelers passing through their lands on the way to Virginia City. Lieutenant Colonel Pearse wouldn’t recommend traveling without one, as far north as we’re going.”

  “And has Lieutenant Colonel Pearse made the trip himself then?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “I thought not.”

  Kohn presses on. He wants Molloy’s sanction to bring the Pawnee as a guide. He feels they will need him. “Jonathan’s a temporary take-​on, sir. He’s got a private’s rank. It’s customary, apparently, to pay him half in advance from our own monies, pay him the rest when we’re finished with him and claim his wages back from the paymaster later.”

  “Not much incentive for him to stay the course otherwise.” Molloy says.

  Kohn says, “Sir, he will stay on as long as we will have him. According to Pearse, Jonathan here lives to fight the Sioux and is only happy to be paid for it as well.”

  Molloy sips again from his canteen and this time hands it to the Indian when he is finished. “Welcome aboard our little ship, Jonathan.” He turns to Kohn and begins to slide from his saddle. His mount corrects the slide from underneath him, keeping Molloy upright. “I wonder does an Indian even know what a ship is? Has Jonathan ever seen the ocean? Have you ever seen the ocean, Jonathan?”

  The Indian takes a long drink and hands the canteen back to Molloy without answering.

  Kohn approaches, pressing his mount close in on Molloy’s. “Will I tie you on, sir?”

  “You insult me, Kohn. You never cease with your bloody fretting. Sissy would never buck me, would she? Would you, girl?” He pats the mare’s neck and the horse settles. She shakes her ear free from the Indian’s fingers and nips at Kohn’s mount.

  Kohn’s horse is new enough to him, a fine Louisiana quarter he won from a mustered-​out Confederate major in Austin in a game of sevens some months before. There had been as much chance the rebel major would challenge Kohn to a duel as pay his debts in horseflesh but the man had come a gentleman. Kohn has been through nine or ten mounts in the three years he has been with Molloy. Most shot out from under him. Several made lame through ill-​ or over-​use and one dead by infected water moccasin bite. Kohn has not allowed himself to become attached to this new horse and neither has Molloy’s mount taken to her.

  “Are you well enough to travel, sir?” Kohn says.

  Molloy ignores him and takes another swig from his canteen. “Lead the way, Jonathan. Time for you to earn your keep. And watch out for Indians, my good man. I’m told they are everywhere in this country.”

  Molloy laughs at his own joke but the others do not. Instead, they spur their mounts and move off, pack mules in tow. Kohn fears it is late in the day, late in the season, to be starting such a journey.

  6

  LABOURING ON ANOTHER FARM & DECIDING TO TAKE ON AGAIN UNDER UNCLE SAM’S BANNER

  AS YOU CAN SURELY TELL BY NOW SIR THIS IS NO DIARY like I did want to write back when the Great General Sherman gave me the notion. It is no fine memoir of my Life & Times in the West like you see so many folk reading by the by. It is something different altogether. I would not write it at all surely if it was a testament to be read by any other but yourself for there are shameful things to come that should not be shifted from the dark of the mind where they are held. These things have no right to ink & paper in regular times for regular men.

  But a man’s life does take some wild turns & if only so that there is a record of the life myself & my brother lived on this Earth I will go on. I will continue so that there will be some small sign that we existed on it & that we played our best with the cards we got dealt. Well only for this I will go on scratching these pages though it does make my heart ache to do it.

  LATER THAT SAME WEEK after we left the Harris farm Tom & myself found work on another. I cannot recall the new farmer’s name Curse of the Devil on him anyway. It was a larger holding than the Harris stake a 2 day walk from Chillicoth & for a week we laboured there in the turnip fields beside freed black men & women for 55¢ a day. And though it was a fair stretch from the 75¢ we took under Harris we did not gripe over it because beggars as we ought not be choosers & at least we took our lodging in the barn while the blacks made do on less money with no lodging at all.

  A small part of me then seen this as injustice for our work did be the same black & white & I learnt off 1 of the black fellows that he & his wife & their small children (who did also labour with us in the fields) made their home under the canvas of a surplus Army wedge tent strung between branches in a nearby stand of trees in all weathers. So I did feel at least some good fortune in being among the white men of this country though as 2 poor Irish boys we were in truth little better to the farmers of Ohio than the niggers & in some ways worse because we demanded better pay.

  If ever I stopped to ponder why we were sheltered with the beasts but not as beasts like the blacks well I reckoned that at least we had s
ome learning for to read a seed bag or such & in my foolishness I considered that it may be this that made us deserving of finer lodging. But in truth no farmer did care if you could read the whole of the Bard Shakespeare or the Blessed Holy Bible itself. A hiring farmer checked your hands for hardened blisters to see are you used to work for that is all they gave a D___ for. Some were good about it & did shake your hand like a fellow well met & got a rub of your palm that way while others pure ignorant did tell you outright, “Show me your hands before I hire you boy.” It was the way of things then & may still be now. We were accustomed to it.

  But when the rain came down over Ohio & made the fields into mud as thick as blackstrap & turned the nights damp & cool well I did wonder on them Africans under canvas their children wet & hacking with the croup & my heart swoll up some with guilt. For in truth I know that though we are weathered farm boys Tom & myself & able for the work of 2 men each & that we are fine men for the animals & such well I know too that there be no bodies more fit to hard labour than them brought to this country & bought & sold on the back of it like the black Africans.

  But on the other hand my heart rode the guilt only so far when I stopped to reckon that Tom took a minie ball in the mouth for to free them from terrible bondage. After all under canvas in a wood & free was better than no freedom at all & many American & foreign boys suffered a great & terrible cost to get it. So mostly I thought that what Tom & myself suffered in the name of liberty for them Africans was worth a kip with the beasts & wages 10¢ to the ripe side of their own at the very least.

  In truth it was not hard to stamp out any shame I might of felt. For though the African lad labouring beside us there at that farm & living under canvas in the wood did seem a fine & decent fellow him quick to smile & proud of his wife & children & comfortable in his liberty as if like any white man he was entitled to it well in spite all this I never did call a black man a friend & likely never would because it is just not the way of things. Just as no well heeled Methodist gentleman would take the hand in friendship of a Catholic Irish man or the vicey versa. It is not done in this country & it never will be because there does be too much between us by way of hard ideas & ill feeling. Each to his own so it is said for it is hard enough understanding ourselves & those like us without having to trouble ourselves trying to know them that are so different. (This does not be always true in the Army as you know Sir but I will let it bide for here I am talking of life in the world outside it.)

  So let that black fellow himself beg the farmer for a proper hay stuffed bed or better wages because it is every man for his own self in America & every man living in her wide spaces knows it or goes hungry & May You Be F______ For Your Troubles! as the saying goes.

  But sometimes when my thinking was like this I did call a halt to it & wonder was my brother’s foul & fevered view on the world starting to put a warp to my own way of looking on things? The possibility of this turned me woeful & something at a slant to things myself. In truth I think a thing 1 minute & then something different the next. I knew many black whores in the war & some I did surely call friend if only for the short time we passed together God Forgive Me. Life is a queer thing.

  Yet all the workings of my mind & my conscience were of no real matter for in the end it was the black hand & his wife & childer who did be kept on in the farmer’s employ while Tom & I were for the road. It was us the hungry ones & I will never know if we were cut loose because Harris’s slander did finally worm its way to the new farmer’s ear or because the new farmer finally decided that he could work 4 blacks for the price of 2 white veteran soldiers who though hard men for the work did no doubt be hard men to look at & harder men to warm to with Tom’s hollowed out face & bitter eyes.

  So the road for us & I well recall it stopping 1/2 way from hell to nowhere wondering what would become of us with 13$ between us & only our haversacks for a home.

  “So where now brother?” says Tom to me after us walking half the day going where only God knows. He was squatting on the roadside sharpening that Bowie with a whetstone by way of a habit he has when one of his angers is after stirring inside him. It is like men who when vexed do smoke more or chaw at their nails. It is the same with Tom sharpening that knife but you would not care to see it.

  And as I stood there with fields of corn shifting in the wind to either side of the road & with a grey sky above us & the waning heat of September upon our shoulders I felt tears rising in my eyes & I did rub at them with scabbed knuckles. For though I knew it was not all Tom’s fault that the 2nd farmer gave us marching orders with no blessing for the trail well some small mean part of me blamed the ugly roasted head of Tom & the way his eyes never just looked upon a thing but instead hunted it my brother’s eyes like them on a falcon instead of a regular man of the world. I tell you them eyes would put the fear of God in any farmer with sense on him. So while 1 part of me did blame Tom for this another part felt guilt for the blaming & as if to rid my heart of such feelings a rage as pure & dark as one of Tom’s rages did brew up inside me & I tell you I could of wept with it. Black notions filled me like soured milk in a pail bubbling & rotten.

  “May this whole country & all in it be f_____,” says I to myself for what it done on us. May it be f_____ for what it done on the nice packet we saved in the war & put aside to buy a parcel of land for to live on. May it be f_____ for its War Between The States & what that War wrought on Tom & f___ as well the Army for thinking his injuries did be not bad enough by 1/2 to warrant a proper pension. And may every one of them freed darky niggers be f_____ for taking our labouring jobs at slave’s rates & f___ every tight fisted farmer stuffed to the guts with the greed of a land agent’s fattest daughter. And f___ the Sullivan boy them years back for the soft head of him & for dying under a blow that would not of felled my sweet mother God Be With Her & driving us brothers from Ireland & off into the terrible wide world. And most of all f____ Tom for the notion he had that no matter what the world did to him he would do to the world one worse.

  Mad with pity for myself I was & for my plight. Well I could of kilt my brother stone dead there on the roadside but soon the feeling passed only for sadness to settle down in its place.

  “We could take on again with the Army,” says Tom in Irish with his knife back in its scabbard & the calm come on him again like a storm gone past us. Says he, “A free ride West & some savings before we skedaddle by night & claim ourselves a farm of land as we did plan all along.”

  Well I did want to scream at my brother then. The Army! The poxed & cursed Army? Has the pig f_____ Army not took enough off you to sate it? Have you not took enough off it to last 2 men 2 lives? But I did not holler all this & May God Forgive Me my restraint.

  Instead I scinched my eyes tight closed for to staunch the tears of anger hoping fierce that when I opened them we might not be standing on a roadside tween cornfields in Ohio but somewhere else & better altogether.

  “The Army Tom? Have you gone mad have you?” says I back to my brother.

  “Sure there are worse things we might be getting on with the hard days that are in it,” says he. “I cannot abide no more farmers Michael. I might just gut one of them & then where would we be?”

  He did smile as he said this & I thought Well isn’t it a fine thing you can laugh at what is not so much a joke at all?

  “There must be something else for us if we think on it Tom,” says I.

  “Thinking of work does not fill a man’s belly.”

  My face went dark. I know it did because with Tom everything does be in deadly earnest until of a sudden it becomes a joke. You never know when & it makes life a trial with him betimes. Says I, “You do try a man’s patience Tom.”

  “Poor Mickaleen. Hunger makes you like a vexed wife.”

  “It is not hunger,” I said back to him. “It is you & your wild notions.”

  “So will it be the Army then brother?” says he still smiling like the most ugly lunatic in the asylum.

  “The f______
Army then G___ D____ you!” says I knowing I would say it & knowing I would regret the saying. But as you may be thinking Sir I did not know how much I would regret it.

  So our decision was made just like that with little thought given to it. At least our bellies will be full I told myself more than once 100 times even! as we walked on down the road for Columbus where there was a depot where we could take on again with Uncle Sam. I tell you Sir there was no better fools than us fit for this very Army of fools.

  The only thing that kept my feet going 1 foot in front of the other was knowing that the Army would surely send us West where we might with our saved wages once again aspire to buy a small farm of land. Or maybe we will just stake claim on a plot of some acres for it is said they are nearly giving land away there is so much of it west of the Mississippi & all of it in want of men to work it or beasts to graze it.

  “And there is gold out West,” says I to myself the earth bulging up over the seams with it so goes the scuttlebutt in taverns from Boston to Baltimore. It is said all a fellow has to do is throw a spade at the dirt in Virginia City or Silver Creek & he will be riding the pig’s back his pockets bursting for the weight of gold & silver. Well every soul knows about saloon tales & I never did believe all of them but sure there it was in my head as I walked for I was searching the very air for reasons why taking on again with the Army would be good for us brothers & not as bad as it turned out the last time.

  3 days we walked & the weather was fair for September in Ohio & we slept in hayricks or under trees on the roadside. On the 3rd day we bummed a lift up on a farmer’s wagon. That farmer was a veteran soldier of an Ohio volunteer regiment himself the 34th I think & a man who after some time saw us for boys who like himself once met the Elephant of War & lived to tell of it Thank God. Truly he was a blessing him & his slow horse & cart.