by Win Blevins
Then he noticed that something looked wrong—a hump on Elaine’s chest. He reached and carefully drew the covers down from her neck. The ribbons of her nightgown had been untied, and it lay open, exposing her pale body. Between her small, delicate breasts reposed a horse turd.
Smith picked it up. Not quite dry.
He felt a spasm of hatred. “You’re dead,” Smith said softly to Twist. He pictured the Indian riding silently through the night, back toward the Human Beings. “You’re dead.”
Chapter 14
Smith endured Richtarsch’s needle ironically, but there was something frightening, intimidating, about having stitches done next to your eye. He sucked in his breath quickly, got pierced again, and forced himself to relax and let it out.
No doubt Richtarsch and Wockerley thought Smith had been fighting and fornicating last night. How else would he get cut around the eye? And the neatness of the incision let experienced eyes know it had been done by a knife. A knife fight, how like an Indian. You can paint civilization onto a barbarian, but what you get is a painted barbarian.
Praise be, his colleagues were not going to ask any questions about how he got cut, or let on that it was anything out of the ordinary. They were going to maintain the facade of collegiality.
Richtarsch set down the needle, clipped the ends of the thread, and slapped his hands together as though brushing dust off. “That will do it, I think, Dr. Maclean, and very well.”
He handed Smith a hand mirror. The stitches made a black row of tracks around the outside edge of his eye. The effect was piratical.
Richtarsch was the opposite of Wockerley—talkative, dynamic, respectful (overrespectful) to Smith, and cocksure of himself. He was ultra-military, his uniform gleaming, his bearing erect, his movements snappy, even his buttocks, Smith noticed, taut.
Now he “moved around Elaine with the air of a man on the stage he was born to. He held up her wrist and declared her pulse normal. He touched her forehead and judged sonorously that she was not feverish. He felt and smelled her shin wound and found it warm. He also observed that it was not inflamed.
“Gut,” he said, “no infection.” Sometimes Dieter Richtarsch’s German birth spoke through his English pronunciations. Wockerley said he’d earned a considerable reputation as a surgeon in the War Between the States and become something of an authority on serious fractures.
Richtarsch inspected the shin minutely where the bones were broken and palpated it firmly. Smith watched Elaine’s face for pain, but Wockerley had her deeply medicated, and she looked placid.
“It is displaced,” Richtarsch said authoritatively. He gave a formal smile through his red mustache and beard.
He stood and brushed his hands as though to get dust off them. “Well, it is not zo bad, Dr. Maclean. We have seen many of these in the Rebellion. Many plus many. The treatment is straightforward—traction. We got a good result many times, but sometimes not.” The surgeon’s w’s were only halfway to v’s, which was not bad.
“Of course it takes weeks. At the fort, fine, she could be there, but it’s not so good to move her now. Dr. Wockerley, could you see fit to care for the patient here? I could come in and check her every few days, which would be sufficient.”
“Of course, Dr. Richtarsch.” Wockerley was all the deferential fool now. “Of course, the fort would be less expensive for Dr. Maclean.” Apparently the army would help out a civilian and charge nothing. A white woman, anyway.
Richtarsch waved that consideration off. Evidently Richtarsch judged that money couldn’t be a consideration to a doctor, even a redskin doctor. Or if it could be, it would be not mannerly or not collegial to admit the possibility.
Smith wondered if Wockerley agreed to board Elaine because he wanted the pay, or because he would cater to whatever Richtarsch wanted.
“So. Why not today, hmmm? Things are not getting any better as we wait.” The German doctor looked boldy at his two colleagues, and neither protested. “I will ask Private Connors to go get the mechanical equipment.” Smith supposed Private Connors was the soldier waiting at the buggy outside. “In the meantime, let’s get some lunch. Will you join me, gentlemen?”
Wockerley accepted eagerly, but Smith said he wanted to stay with Elaine.
The two doctors made their way toward the street, Richtarsch talking enthusiastically. “I like the Saratoga,” declared Richtarsch. “That Chalk Beeson sets an excellent table. Remarkable name, isn’t it—Chalk? Very American …”
Smith could no longer hear the fellow.
He looked at his wife and sat down next to her. He took her hand, surrounded it with his oversized ones, and rested it in his lap. She still felt the effects of the laudanum now. Richtarsch would be ready to reset the bones in about three hours, so she would need more anodyne in about two hours.
Maybe, just before then, she would be better able to hear and understand him. Maybe he would be able to tell her. Ask her. Whatever. It was then or not at all.
She heard Adam only now and again. She seemed to be borne up on a cresting wave of consciousness and dropped into a trough of oblivion. Though she couldn’t make out all the words or be sure what he was asking, she knew the music of what he was saying, knew the melody but not the lyrics. He was uncertain. He hurt. He didn’t know whether she wanted him. He didn’t know whether to go back to the people or stay with her.
She felt washed in regret. She felt for Adam and wanted to reach out to him. She couldn’t—she didn’t have whatever it took to reach out to him or anybody. He was too far away. Everything was too far away.
She tried once to take his hand, but succeeded only in flopping her own hand off her lap and onto the bed. He didn’t see what she wanted to give him, and didn’t grasp her hand.
She wanted to tell him that she wanted to be married to him and to live with him forever. But she couldn’t tell him that now—she couldn’t have if she’d been all right. It was too momentous, too dangerous, and she was too shattered, too much in need of being put back together. She wanted to want him. She thought she would after she was safe, nurtured, and whole.
Making declarations to him now would be talking of life ashore. She didn’t know whether she would get to shore.
She knew what he was going through, what he thought, what he feared. She had known right along, known without admitting to herself that she knew. He felt ashamed that he had brought her into his world, and nearly destroyed her life. He felt ashamed of the barbarous way his people lived, and of himself—and at the same time he felt proud of the beautiful and spiritual way they lived, and of himself. He felt unwanted because she’d been reluctant to make love to him … well, in the rocks and the dirt. He felt not good enough for her, and at the same time hated her for thinking him not good enough. Which she didn’t. He feared she’d meant it literally when she made that dumb remark about running away.
She regretted it all, but the regret seemed far away. She did not so much love him as she wanted to love him. She would love him when she got back to shore, she knew she would, but that was so far away, perhaps unreachable.
He took her hand, and that made her glad. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Tears glistened on his broad, flat, manly face. A lovable face. She did love him. She squeezed his hand affectionately and closed her eyes.
It was so hard, it was all so hard.
She had a picture in her head, splinters of timbers covered with foam and floating in the sea, being borne away from the shore by some unseen but all-powerful tide. She wondered whether she and Adam were caught up in such a tide. If so, they had no say in where it would take them.
Suddenly she felt a great urgency. She must say something to him. She must set him free to go to the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio with a good conscience, she must. She began sorting out the words in her mind, like polished pebbles she wanted to give him. Sometimes she lost track, but then she rearranged her pebbles, and at last turned onto her side and tried to raise up on one elbow. Adam grasped her, concerned.
Speak, she shouted at herself. Speak.
Smith held his wife up, wondering what she wanted. Did she want to tell him something? He’d gotten used to talking to himself, talking himself through whatever he had to go through, a solitary passage.
Elaine fell back and lay still. Occasionally her lips worked, but only a whispery rasp came out, far from language. He wondered if she was saying, “Don’t go.” Or, “Come back.”
But he didn’t know. Smith could permit himself no illusion or sentimentality, not at a time like this. He would have to go on. He would have to go without feeling sure where their marriage stood.
He would go on with the Cheyennes toward the Powder River. Toward it, and maybe only toward. If all turned out well, he would come back for her—hunt her down if necessary. But he would understand if she wanted to end the marriage. Maybe she hadn’t understood the life she was letting herself in for. Truly not.
He loved her. He loved her. He loved her.
Adam Smith Maclean stood up, looked at his sleeping wife, bent and kissed her forehead. He would not wait for the doctors to come back, would not help them set up the traction. She was not infected, and that would have to be enough.
His lot was chosen. He would get his horse from the livery and go back to being what he really was, a poor, desperate Indian.
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
Riding was doing for Smith what juggling normally did. Repetitive, wearying, relaxing, it lulled his head into the peace of thoughtlessness.
He told himself what he wasn’t thinking about was Twist. What he really wasn’t thinking about was Elaine.
Sings Wolf hadn’t said a word about Smith’s coming back. He merely asked whether Elaine was OK. Smith said only, “I think so.” Sings Wolf acted like he expected his grandson’s return, but seemed neither pleased nor displeased by it. He made no comment when Smith changed his white-man clothes for hide shirt, breechcloth, and moccasins, and no comment on the stitches on the outside of Smith’s eye.
Smith felt embarrassed to tell him about Twist and the episode in front of the porch. He’d reacted slowly and carelessly, he admitted, and in a flat, laconic way told about being pinned down and threatened and cut, not even hinting at his outrage. He even told the part about the horse turd between Elaine’s breasts dryly.
All Sings Wolf had to say was, “You are a Cheyenne.”
“I have to do something about him, Grandfather.” But Smith knew what Sings Wolf meant. The taboo against a Cheyenne killing another Cheyenne was inviolable. When it happened, the buffalo hat began to stink like rotting flesh, and the sacred arrows became speckled with blood. The powers would turn against the people in lots of ways until the rottenness among them was purged.
Of course, times were changing. The hat and arrows were left behind in the south, and they no longer seemed to have their old power. But Smith couldn’t afford to be the one to show the weakness of the hat and arrows.
And how fitting for a doctor, Smith mocked himself in his head, to seek to bring medicine to a people who shunned him, who would not let him live among them or even speak to him. If he killed Twist, he would be throwing away the life he’d worked for.
If he didn’t, Twist might kill him.
Sings Wolf had said, “You are a Cheyenne.” Clear enough. Smith knew it made no difference that his father was a white man—when the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio accepted you as one of the people, you were one forever.
Years ago the Cheyennes captured a bunch of Crows and took them into the tribe. Later, the Crow tribe attacked the Cheyennes and killed many. In their grief, the Cheyennes killed some of the former Crow captives. And the buffalo hat stank, and the sacred arrows got bloody. So the people knew that even a person adopted into the tribe was truly a Cheyenne.
Well, Smith told himself, you’re going to have to do something about Twist. He fingered the stitches around his eye. He damn well intended to take care of Twist. But he had no idea how.
Smith and Sings Wolf pushed their horses long but no harder than necessary for a night and a day and a night, keeping to a lope as much as they could, getting the most distance from man and beast. They rode generally northwest, hoping to catch the other Human Beings where the people would cross the Smoky Hill River, or at least pick up their trail there.
Sings Wolf knew the country, but it had changed plenty. Where buffalo plains had stretched only five winters ago, farms and ranches claimed the land everywhere. Though the two rode in silence, Sings Wolf made an occasional snort of disgust.
They had to keep an eye out. They were two Indians on the move through a territory crazy with Indian fever. The newspaper in Dodge said Colonel Lewis and his troops had taken the railroad west from Fort Dodge and would intercept the Cheyennes at the Dull Knife crossing of the Arkansas or pursue them north and punish them. Colonel Lewis, the paper said, considered this campaign against the Indians a travesty. Now he intended to annihilate them. He pledged to come back victorious or dead. The paper also said that if the Indians got as far as the Platte River, where the Union Pacific Railroad ran, thirteen thousand soldiers would be mobilized to corral them.
Thirteen thousand against three hundred! Actually thirteen thousand fighting men outfitted with Springfield rifles against fewer than a hundred men, old men, and boys mostly armed with spears, clubs, and bows and arrows.
It made Smith smile to himself when he told Sings Wolf about the thirteen thousand. There was something grand about making this foolish gesture, and Smith was exhilarated at being part of it.
But Smith and Sings Wolf didn’t want to fight with any of the settlers in this country, which might raise the thirteen thousand to thirty thousand. So they rode all night, kneeing the horses to a canter on the wagon roads and easy ground, walking through the more broken country. They rested themselves and the horses for a couple of hours at sunup, noon, sundown, and when the Big Dipper said midnight. Otherwise they stayed on the move, keeping their eyes out for trouble. Smith had no illusions about any white people sparing him. Not after he’d seen the hysteria in Dodge City.
Every time they saw a fence, Sings Wolf turned sour-looking. Even the white ranchers didn’t like fences. The farmers were staking out the land. Fences turned the circle of the world into square-mile parcels. Fences spoiled both the life of Indians who followed the buffalo and the lives of the cowboys who herded cattle. Worse, Smith doubted that this dry country would ever work out for farming. Dumb, the whole business.
From time to time they saw buildings at a distance, but stayed behind the hills where they wouldn’t likely be seen. And in any case they pushed the horses along hard enough to make any pursuers work like hell to catch them.
At first light on the second day, well away from farms, ranches, roads, or even paths, they cantered toward some cottonwoods along a little creek a mile off in the bottom, eyeballing them carefully. They didn’t see the damned preacher until they topped the rise and practically rode over him.
The Reverend Ecclesiastes Bountiful Ratz, an itinerant man of God, endowed with beard and belly of apocalyptic dimensions but only one usable eye, heard the hoof beats coming. He reached for his side-by-side, eager to do battle with evil. When he saw a pair of the Lord’s vermin loping up, he cut loose with a blast of hot and holy buckshot and hollered, “Praise the Lord!”
His daughter Hindy, scrunched into the bottom of the wagon, figured she and her father were finally dead. And Hindy no longer had any hope of heaven. If her pa preached it, she knew it was a figment of a demented imagination.
Dead. What a relief.
But through the cracks between the wagon boards she saw the big horse in the lead go down hard, and the Indian went rolling like a wheel knocked off.
The Indian behind swung to the outside of his horse, and the shot from Pa’s other barrel gutted the space above an empty saddle.
The Indian rose and let go an arrow toward Pa. The way Hindy saw it, that arrow sailed slow as a feather falling. It lofted over o
ne side of the wagon, sang its way through the air above Pa’s supplies, and aimed straight for Pa’s head behind the other wagon side.
The Ratzes’ vehicle was a platform spring wagon, bought as only a tongue, frame, axles, and wheels for a restoration project. The Reverend Ratz repaired it with the haphazard attention that he gave to all earthly things. He had tacked on some warped outhouse boards to give the wagon a pretense at sides and didn’t care that they came together all jangly, like in-laws.
Ecclesiastes at this moment had his one good eye fixed on the action through one of the gaps in the warped boards. He thought it was a handy gap, too, until that arrow by rarest chance hit the lower board and splintered it.
The arrow would have missed, but the board deflected it into Ecclesiastes’s ear, where it plowed a rip-roaring furrow.
Unfortunately, the splinter, thick as a man’s thumb and twice as long, pivoted and poked straight into Ecclesiastes’ nose next to his good eye. Blood issued forth abundantly, rendering the good reverend entirely blind.
With the world gone out, and his life’s blood gushing down his face and neck and chest, and those two unholy vermin no doubt taking aim to dispatch him, Ecclesiastes Ratz felt a single imperative. It erupted inside him like the fateful lightning where the grapes of wrath are stored: he wanted to run like hell.
And run the reverend did. First he howled like a steam whistle. Then, still howling, he lit out like an engine run off the track. He was about the size of a railroad engine, and could see about as well as one, and looked about as graceful going cross-country on the Kansas plains. He spun his wheels. He rolled over sideways and teetered upright again. He plunged into a gully and careened back out. He slithered and spun and churned up dust across another fifty yards of prairie, dived into a bigger gully, and stayed put.
Smith swore later that he emitted a last gasp of steam.
The two Indians and the teenage girl watched engine Ecclesiastes go amuck in awed silence.