by James Wade
The Indian, she saw, was little more than a teenage boy and she asked where the healer was and he said he was the healer and that Hiushenuah had been dead since the last snows. I am Tuhallinho, he told her.
“Where are your people?” she asked and the boy waved her off and held his hand on Randall’s wound and closed his eyes and spoke into the sky in soft tones.
“Can you dig it out?” she asked.
“You gonna let that dadgum savage stick a knife in Mr. Dawson?” Tad shook his head.
“Pumpkin,” the child said and shook his head likewise.
“He will die,” the Indian said and rose and walked toward his horse.
“Wait,” Charlotte begged. “You are Strassi? The Strassi people?”
The boy hesitated and turned and looked around as if the desert might be listening. He nodded.
“Please,” she said in the boy’s native tongue. “This man’s heart is good. Heal him.”
The Strassi boy looked at her.
“Chenina Wasqua,” he said, nodding. “My sister.”
* * *
The boy had finished his work and led them to the mouth of a network of caves and Charlotte recognized it all, as if she had dreamed it or perhaps lived it in a life past. The clomping of the horses echoed off the wet walls of the cavern and soon they were in the barn room and small Indian children, boys and girls, took their horses and led them to the naturally occurring troughs and tied them to pillars of dolomite.
They continued down on foot and in the great room both Tad and the child stared up in awe at the height of the cavern roof and the number of Strassi who moved about the underground village. The Indian healer stopped and spoke to a group of men, and they looked at the newcomers and nodded. Soon the chieftain came forward and smiled and put his hands on Charlotte’s shoulders.
“Chenina Wasqua,” he said. “Welcome home.”
They were taken to a low passage and all but the child ducked to enter and the walls to either side were barely wide enough to fit the travois which held Randall’s body. A dozen yards down the dark tunnel the cave opened up into a small room with rounded rock walls and a ceiling which never rose above six feet. There were many blankets covering the cold ground and animal skins hanging on the wall for insulation. A small fire burned in a clay pit near the corner of the room and the smoke rose and disappeared into a hole in the wall near the rock roof. An Indian girl sat naked in the center of the cave and the low light from the stunted flame cast her shadow upon them as they entered.
The healer spoke to her and when she answered her words were unpleasant. The two began to shout at one another and eventually she stood and stamped her bare foot and then pushed past the group and disappeared into the dark passage. Tad and the child watched her with wide eyes as she left, then continued to stare long after she was gone.
They laid Randall on a pile of blankets and covered him with deer hides. Charlotte pulled from her bag a layer of bandaging and showed it to the healer.
“More,” she said, and he nodded and left the room.
* * *
She gently rolled Randall to his side and continued to wrap his wound in fresh cloth. He lay with his eyes open. It had been two days and he was beginning to heal. A fever had come on the first night, but the Indian boy had given him herbs and soup and his skin had cooled and his breathing steadied.
“Your boyfriend the one who fixed me up?” he asked her.
“No.”
“You talk to him?”
“Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You imagine a world different than this one?” he asked her.
“You mean like Heaven?”
“No.”
“Well, whatchyou mean?”
“I mean a world, this world, but different.”
“You catching another fever?”
“No, I’m not.” He paused. “I don’t think.”
“Well, you ain’t making much sense.”
“You believe in God?”
“I don’t know what I believe, to tell it straight. My family, and all my people, they was in chains a long time and they didn’t stop praying and singing and worshipping God.”
“You think God gave them freedom?”
“I think Lincoln gave them freedom, and a bunch of dead soldiers, and maybe they had some help from God. I couldn’t say.”
Charlotte was quiet for a moment, then spoke again.
“I couldn’t say if God let black people out of their chains, because if there is a God, He must have put them there in the first place.”
“You think God has failed the world?” Randall asked.
“I might. You reckon the world has failed Him?”
“I might.”
“Well.”
“You are devastatingly beautiful, did you know that?” he said, looking up at her.
“Randall.” She turned her face away from him.
“No, you are. You are the warrior queen of the West.”
“Warrior queen?” She laughed.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what are you?”
“I’m the court jester.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A fool.”
“Well.”
“I should never have stopped you,” he told her. “By the river.”
“Randall.”
“I was scared of my own feelings. That’s all.”
“You were right. You got you a wife back home.”
“I don’t believe I have either of those things—a wife or a home.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“You’ve saved me, Charlotte, in so many ways. I’m sorry I let you down.”
She leaned over him and put her hand on his cheek. Then she rose from the pile of blankets and left.
* * *
She was in love with him. She knew that. She’d been in love once before and recognized the symptoms and was even less happy about it now than she had been before. She had seen his mother in the big room of the cave but the woman ignored her and she wondered if he was dead or on a hunting party or perhaps just staying away from her. He was married, she thought. If he was not dead, he was surely married.
Tad found her near the west-facing mouth of the hidden caverns.
“I gotta tell you, Miss Charlie, these Indians ain’t half bad. You tried any of that fry bread? Lord have mercy.”
She smiled at him.
“Pumpkin’s took a shine to ’em, and he seems to be a good judge of character. He’s down there with the little’uns playing some kind of game I couldn’t make no sense of. How’s Mr. Dawson holding up?”
“He’s gonna be fine.”
“Well, I imagine his old pride took a bullet too. ’Course it can’t be every man who just has them instincts like mine,” the boy said, pulling his shoulders back with a long sigh. “It’s not like I learned ’em or anything. Some fellas was just born from a different cloth.”
“It’s cut,” she corrected him.
“What is? Never mind, it don’t make no difference. What are you doing up here anyhow?”
“Just looking.”
“At what?”
“Things.”
“Alright then,” Tad said and the two of them sat in the quiet of the dusk and looked out over the prairie.
The sky turned yellow and orange and streaks of red were cast across the grasses. They moved together to the symphony of the wind and flowed back and forth as does the sea, and they covered what parts of the earth they could and left the rest to the dirt and rock and clay.
“What was his boy like?” Charlotte asked, breaking the silence.
“Who, Harry? Aw, he was a good’un. Little more rough around the edges than
Mr. Dawson, which ain’t that hard. Harry spent a lot of time with the horses. Preferred ’em to people I’d imagine. Me and him used to make forts in the wood with bed cloth and when his momma would see the sheets all dirty and stained she’d wear out his backside and I’d always think that was the last time, but then he’d come find me in a few days with an armful of linens and we’d do it over again.”
“He love his daddy?”
“He did, sure enough. Don’t know about his momma, to tell you the truth, but he respected Mr. Dawson in a certain way.”
“What way?”
“Hard to say. I was afraid of my daddy, so I had that sort of respect for him. Harry wasn’t afraid of Mr. Dawson at all but he still looked up to him or something like that. I think that makes it better, when you’re not afraid.”
* * *
That night Charlotte was summoned to the great room and there the Strassi elders asked to hear of her travels and they sat patient and attentive as she talked. They asked of her companions and their purpose and she told them and they nodded and spoke among themselves.
“It is good you are here, dark daughter,” the chieftain said. “My soul is happy to see you, and many have told me the same. But the whites cannot stay. Their place is not here.”
Charlotte nodded.
“The wounded white loves you. So too does Shaytaomo. He will return soon from his hunting in the mountains. This is not good. The whites must leave.”
“They will,” she assured him. “And I will leave with them.”
The old man nodded.
“This is what I knew. You love the wounded white. Many have seen this in you.”
Charlotte turned her eyes to the floor.
“They have seen something else, dark daughter. Something in the white man.”
She looked up.
“His path is crooked and bent. It turns in a way that is hard on the soul. He is a good man, many have said. But he will not always be.”
“I will watch over him,” she told the elders. “I will make sure he is a good man, always.”
Again they spoke among themselves.
“The healer has seen the path this man will walk. He walks it alone.”
“I will go with him,” she insisted.
“This is what I knew.”
One of the men spoke low to the chief and the others nodded.
“There is one last thing,” he told her. “We have seen the men you are searching for.”
25
Pitted up against the slope of the closest gorge the ranch appeared as some modern-day David and the Goliath mountain rose there above it. Grimes at the column’s head held up his hand and moved his finger in a circle. He then put his horse out of the road and into a field of bluestem. The horses followed with their riders and me with all of it and as the grass spread thin the main house grew larger and the bunk barracks multiplied and I sensed this was no poor man’s hacienda. We crossed more than a mile of salt flats and in them standing water which had no doubt come down from the mountain and I walked my horse so that he might not step unknowingly into a false pool and have it deepen on him.
“You gonna twist an ankle thataway, hero-boy,” Shelby said as he slowly pulled Bullet in step.
“I was already slower than the horse,” I replied and he spit and shook his head and when some of the men laughed he rode on angrily and I hadn’t meant to make mock of him but some things are as they are and I wouldn’t apologize.
Shelby had come slinking back to the column the day after the dustup and asked forgiveness for fleeing and while Grimes allowed him to stay, the men were now hard on him. They called him coward and they called him soft and my elevating standing only served to further his feeling of outcast.
I had not spoken to Sophia since Perry Springs. She avoided me for a time, then rode with the scouts ahead to the ranch. The rest of us approached it from the north on the following day.
The ranch unfolded near the base of the mountain, pushed in from the valley with a few sand dunes and sparsely vegetated hills between the last of the structures and the red slate rock of the Sierra de Angar. The front gate alone seemed an oddity of some far-off time brought current and refusing to change. Its posts were pillars of carved stone flared out at top and bottom and upon each sat a lion and a lantern and within one lantern burned a flame but not the other. The iron slats on the gate were thick and black, and the row of Italian cypress flanking the pathway beyond stood tall and straight like sentries beholden to their post now and forever always.
The line of horses headed straight for the casa grande and then followed the path left, curving around the adobe plaster walls of the courtyard, where a host of young Mexican women peered out and watched the procession with sharp eyes, as if it might be an invading force.
I reined up and let the rest of the column pass and from the men there was either no notice or no mind and so I put my horse through the arched entry to the yard. The women turned to watch the young gringo, and I touched my hat and rode along through Bermuda grass cut short and kept green as the color itself. The desert and the mountains and the dust had stolen the color from the world and turned my eyes only to brown, and it filled me with a strange joy to see such grass and the women in white dresses which had stayed white and had been stitched with flowers of blue and red. Their black hair fell long against their pale skin and they looked at me with a great curiosity and I at them and the prominence of their surroundings.
They were preparing for what appeared to be an event of some importance. They hung streamers and lights and set out paper lanterns of all colors, some with designs cut into the bags. There was fruit by the pound cut into squares and placed in bowls and it mixed with the candles and piñon wood burning in the outdoor stove and the air smelled as sweet as I could remember. An older woman nervously oversaw the preparation from the clay-tiled porch coming off the front of the house. The woman leaned on a pillar furiously puffing at a cigarette and called to them words of direction in Spanish. When the woman saw us, the horse and me, she shooed us away from the tables and their fine silver and white cloths.
“Lo siento,” I mumbled and rode beyond the courtyard and under a larger archway connecting the main house and a smaller structure, the latter of which was padlocked and heavily chained.
There was a metal tank on the far side of the house and it was surrounded by roses of several colors and other flowers whose names I did not know. In the tank were lily pads and koi fish and the horse sniffed at both and began to drink and I let him, checking over my back for the woman. I dismounted and led the horse away from the water, lest he inhale the fish, and together we walked the fence line of the house and I could see the dust where the riders had gone and the barracks where they’d stopped.
“We could go on right now,” I told the horse, and he did not respond. “Go out to East Texas and saw on them logs. Forget all this outlawin’ business.
“I know,” I said. “I can’t leave ’em either. I don’t know which one I’m staying for, or if one’s just an excuse to be with the other. I’m pretty mixed up about everything, to tell you the truth.”
The horse tossed his head.
“Yeah, well, you ain’t exactly hating the steady food and water, are you?” I asked him. “I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna tie you to that post yonder and see if there’s somebody in that big house that can spare a biscuit or two for us.”
I stopped at a side door and knocked but no one answered. I pulled the handle and it wasn’t latched and the door swung open and the house was laid out before me in a great chain of connected rooms and hallways that disappeared in all directions.
The man was older than a man should be and he sat alone with his elbows atop a long cedarwood table and I saw him there, slumped over, and his attention tethered to his gaze, which traveled to a mantle at the far side of the room. He looked up and saw me and wave
d me over casually but with great care so that his delicate positioning was not compromised by his motion.
I walked to the table and he patted an empty chair with a shaking hand.
I sat.
“You follow the man Grimes?” he asked and his English was for most intents and purposes better even than my own.
“I don’t follow no one in particular. But I’m riding with him for now.”
“You follow God?”
“I tried a time or two. I got dipped in the water, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The man nodded.
“The man Grimes believes he follows some higher calling. Higher even than God.”
“You don’t reckon he does?”
“A man follows himself and calls it what he will.”
I nodded and leaned back in the chair and motioned to the house and beyond.
“You own all this here?” I asked.
The man shrugged.
“A man owns only his decisions,” he said.
I stared at him for a while. If he was wondering who I was or bothered at all by my presence he didn’t once show it.
“I ain’t what you think,” I said. “I ain’t no outlaw like him.”
The man nodded as if he accepted this as truth just by my saying it.
“And me?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“You think me an outlaw like Grimes?”
“Well, if you’re the man pulling the strings—the one Grimes talks about—then I guess you’re as much a part of it as any.”
“I pay for horses, for food, for other things. What do you do?” he asked.
“I don’t do much of anything,” I replied.
“You have not killed for the man Grimes?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“And yet you say you are not an outlaw.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Nothing is fair, boy. Do you agree?”
“I’m not sure I can speak to that, señor.”
“And yet you are speaking. You say you do not follow God, nor the man Grimes, but here you are and so you must be speaking to something, yes?”