Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  Hatcher agreed, “Right from the very first time I laid eyes on him down to Taos, I knowed in my bones there was something a mite odd about that child.”

  “Yep,” echoed Solomon. “Young as he was—to have his hair turn like it did.”

  “Don’t matter how young a feller is when hoo-doos reach out an’ grab hold,” Rowland protested, stretching out his arm, making a claw of his fingers. “Hoo-doos gonna leave their mark on you.”

  Bass snorted. “Sounds to me like you believe in ghosts your own self, Johnny.”

  “How ’bout it, boys? Any of ye see’d any of McAfferty’s hoo-doos yer own selves when ye was with him?” Hatcher added.

  Shaking his head, Wood said, “I ain’t never seen none for myself … but I rode many a mile, and many a moon, with Asa McAfferty. I saw what become of a man who did see a hoo-doo. A man what see’d a Ree Injun rattle shaker’s hoo-doo!”

  “Damn! If that don’t give me goose bumps the way Johnny’s talking!” exclaimed Isaac Simms, rubbing both of his forearms as if he had just suffered a sudden chill.

  “Shit!” roared Elbridge Gray. “Johnny’s got you jumping at shadows now too!”

  Hatcher turned to Rowland, asking, “Whatever come of McAfferty that winter we rode back to Taos, John?”

  At that moment in the timber above their protected valley, a wolf raised its voice to the clear, starlit autumn sky.

  All nine of them turned and listened as the morose howl drifted away slowly, the sound swallowed by the utter, black immensity of that night.

  After a bit of reflection Rowland answered, “Like I said, he didn’t figger to join up with Young or with Robidoux’s outfit. Hell, truth was both of ’em made it real plain that they didn’t want him along come spring.”

  “So he go north with another outfit?” Scratch inquired.

  “No,” Rowland answered. “Near as I know, he never looked for a bunch to trap with after that. Like he knowed others down that way was talking about his hoo-doos that winter, like he knowed there wouldn’t be a man wanted to trap with him.”

  Rufus asked, “What happened to him?”

  “Dunno,” John stated. “I heard tell he up and pulled out of Taos late two winters ago. There in Mexico one day. Gone the next.”

  Wood asked, “By hisself?”

  “Yup. I heard he was all on his lonesome.”

  “Damn,” Hatcher grumbled. “Here I was first thinking he become a strange goat … an’ now I’m feeling a mite sorry for this McAfferty. Feel sorry for a man what no one wants around.”

  “How ’bout you, Johnny?” Elbridge asked. “Would you want to trap with McAfferty now?”

  Shaking his head emphatically, Rowland answered, “Not a whore’s chance in Sunday meeting I’d ever travel the same trail with that one. Something ’bout him killing that rattle shaker, something ’bout that ol’ rattle shaker’s hoo-doo medicine made McAfferty go … go real soft in the head.” Then with a sudden, uncontrollable shudder of his body, John added, “This coon’ll stay as far away from that crazy bastard as I can.”

  “He’s trouble,” Rufus added.

  “Nawww, not like he’s a bad sort,” Rowland explained. “Just that … well, let’s say trouble follers on his bachtrail ever since the rattle shaker’s hoo-doos come after him. Way I see it: McAfferty’s gonna have trouble dogging him the rest of his days, for here on out.”

  “Man’s got enough to worry about in Injun country,” Solomon declared. “He don’t have to take on a partner what’s been turned soft in the head.”

  “So how ’bout you, Hatcher?” Bass inquired with a grin. “You ain’t gonna get soft in the head an’ keep us here till all the passes outta this valley are closed in, are you?”

  “Nawww,” Jack replied. “I figger we each have us one more turn at camp keeper—five days more—and we’ll get on outta here.”

  “To Taos!” Kinkead roared with renewed enthusiasm.

  “Damn right,” Hatcher answered. “We push on over the high side and make for the mud-house Mexican settlements.”

  “Ah! Women got skin the color of smoked leather,” Isaac Simms growled, a hunger glistening in his eyes.

  Rufus Graham agreed, “And Workman’s likker, clear as a summer sky and as strong as the kick of a mule.”

  “I’m half-froze for corn an’ beans,” Caleb Wood said wistfully, then licked his lips. “Don’t make me no never-mind that their bread is flat as it can be—it’s still bread to this here starvin’ nigger!”

  “I ain’t had me no greaser bread since we put Taos at our rumps!” Rowland grumbled.

  “This here nigger can’t wait to get me some of that greaser tobaccy,” explained Elbridge Gray. “How ’bout you, Jack? What you wanna get when we shine in Taos?”

  “Music … music I don’t have to make for everyone else,” Hatcher explained, looking up at the cold sky dreamily. “I wanna listen and dance to such music them greasers play … while’st holding my arm round the waist of a thin gal or a plump one—hell, it don’t make no matter to me! My, my, my: how I look forward just to spin a woman to some music and look down at her purty face, seein’ right there and then in those eyes that she wants this here child to plant his wiping stick atween her legs.”

  “Stand back, you damned greasers!” Rowland shouted to the heavens. “Bow your brown heads to American free men come riding in from the mountains! Get back you damned pelados an’ make way for free mountaineers come to shine in Taos!”

  7

  With each shrinking day Hatcher’s brigade pushed man and beast alike from the first gray stain of predawn until past the coming of slap-dark, putting behind them every mile they could—every man jack anxious for Taos.

  Halting at midday only to water the animals, the trappers doggedly pressed on as the winds grew stronger and the snows fell deeper, like mules with the scent of a home stall strong in their nostrils. Grown restless around their night fires, where they began to talk more and more of the Taos valley, more and more of the spicy food and heady liquor and that strong native tobacco. And as the men pulled their blankets and robes about them with the dropping temperatures, they spoke each night of the dusky women and that particular fragrance of Mexican skin.

  “Not like no Injun woman I ever knowed,” Caleb Wood advised Titus Bass.

  Hatcher snorted. “An’ sure as hell like no white farmer’s gal back to the settlements.”

  Wasn’t Amy Whistler a white farmer’s wife by now? Likely she had her a brood of her own, tugging at her skirt, the newest tucked in her arm, suckling at its mama’s breast. He remembered those breasts at times, how they broke the surface of that swimming hole back to Boone County, Kentucky. Firm and high, slicked with summer cool water, just begging him to fondle, to excite, to kiss each one.

  How about Marissa Guthrie? Had she given Able Guthrie a grandchild yet? Why, the way that girl threw herself into the coupling, Titus was dead certain she was the sort could end up with a man of her own not long after he had pulled himself free and run off for St. Louis that autumn of 1815. Slipping away by the skin of his teeth—for he had fallen in love for the first time in his life … and if he hadn’t escaped, he’d be there still. Working the land, planting seed, tilling the ground, and raising walls around them … just like Able Guthrie, like his own pap, Thaddeus.

  How much better could those greaser gals be than was Fawn, the Ute widow he bedded that first winter in the Rockies? His first Indian, so warm and fragrant with the smells of grease and smoke, bear oil and old soot, had she been. Very much like Pretty Water, the Shoshone woman who had cared for his wounds and sated his hungers that third winter before it came time to leave as the high country began its spring thaw.

  In their own way, each one of them hard to leave behind.

  “Just be keerful you don’t end up like Rowland or Kinkead,” Elbridge Gray warned.

  Scratch would grin every time one of the others chivvied him about the Mex gals. “Don’t you worry none about me, fellas. I
ain’t the marrying kind.”

  “I wasn’t neither,” Matthew protested.

  Hatcher would always roar, “Kinkead wasn’t till he met up with Rosa!”

  At which Kinkead would nod in affirmation and agree, “That’s the solemn truth.”

  Moving south over the low ridge of the Bayou Salade, the outfit dropped west to strike the Arkansas once more, following it downstream for two days until they left the river behind to climb south slowly toward the lowest pass compressed among those mountains surrounding the narrow northern reaches of a valley that eventually widened its funnel into a fertile, verdant floor carpeted with autumn-crisp grass crunching beneath the icy remnants of winter’s recent snow.

  “You’re in Mexico now,” Rufus Graham explained as he brought his horse alongside Bass’s saddle mount.

  “Don’t look no different to me.”

  Solomon Fish explained, “Been in Mexico since we come ’cross the Arkansas.”

  “How far north the greasers ever come?” Scratch asked.

  With a spill of raw laughter Hatcher declared, “Never would they come this far north, Titus Bass. This still be the land of the mountaineer and the Injun. Ain’t many a greaser gonna venture far outta their villages.”

  Down, down through the heart of that high valley they hurried against the lowering storms that gray-shouldered the peaks on their left and right. Finally they struck the river flowing into the valley in a tangle of streams given birth in that high ground to the west.

  “A blind man could foller this all the way from here clear down to Taos,” Caleb instructed Bass that afternoon as they began winding their way along a dim trail some distance back from the brushy banks.

  Hatcher said, “The wust of the ride’s over now, Scratch.” Then he sniffed the cold air deep into his lungs. “Eegod, boys! Why, I swear I can smell tortillas and beans awready!”

  Two days later Bass spotted his first herd of wild horses racing along the bench a short distance above them. None of the creatures appeared to be the least bit concerned about men capturing them—often loping along the outfit’s line of march for hours at a time. On those occasions the trappers had to be very wary that none of their pack animals broke loose to follow the wild herd. The farther south they pushed, the more of those mustangs they encountered crossing their trail day after day. This had to be a horse thief’s paradise, Scratch thought.

  “Injuns in these parts?” he asked of the others one night at their fire as the men unfurled their robes and blankets, settling in for a few hours of sleep.

  “Not many what a man might worry about,” Jack replied.

  Then Elbridge added, “Less’n the Comanche ride down on the town.”

  Hatcher nodded. “The Comanche been known to cause considerable trouble for the Mexicans.”

  Throwing his arm in a wide arc, Bass inquired, “This here Comanche country?”

  “Not rightly,” Jack declared. “They just come here to raid the poor pelados, to carry away everything they can. Horses, cows, mules, anything they take a shine to.”

  “That means they’ll carry off Mex young’uns too,” Solomon stated.

  “What the hell they want with the young’uns?” Scratch asked.

  “Turn ’em into good Comanche,” Caleb said. “The boys they make into warriors, and the girls—well, down the line the girls gonna start having Comanche babies.”

  Rufus wagged his head sadly. “The greasers ain’t all that good at putting up a good fight of it.”

  “Ain’t they got any soldiers?”

  “They got soldiers, Scratch,” Isaac said. “But they ain’t allays the sort to be any help.”

  “What these soldiers good for?”

  “Sometimes they dare ride out on the Santy Fee trail what takes a man back to Missouri,” Hatcher said. “But there’s Comanche out there in that water-scrape hell. So most times them yellow-backed polecats are hanging round where they can be safe when they stare real hard at traders come in from the States. Making sure they’re always somewhere they don’t have to worry ’bout no Comanche.”

  “Mostly, them soldados gonna be where they find lots of women and pass brandy and some fandango to take in,” Caleb said.

  “Fandango?” Scratch asked.

  “Mexican for dance,” Rufus said with a generous grin. “A real hurraw an’ stomp—with plenty likker and womens!”

  Turning back to Hatcher, Titus asked, “So how bad these Comanche be?”

  Jack’s merry eyes darkened. “The Blackfoot be the devil’s sumbitches up north. And down here the wust a man run up against be the Comanch’. Ain’t no red nigger any finer on the back of a horse.”

  That night it snowed, right on into the pale, murky dawn as the sky continued to lower off those craggy mountain slopes rising on either side of them as they flung the fat, icy flakes off their robes and blankets, quickly rolling up the bedding and lashing it atop the packs they hung across the backs of their animals. The wind stirred just before sunrise, hurling itself at their backs all that day, whining and whimpering around them on into that night when they made camp just as the sky muddied and the snow finally let up.

  “How far now, Jack?”

  Hatcher ruminated on that a moment, then said to Scratch, “Less’n a week, give or take.”

  “Five days, I’ll wager,” Solomon declared.

  “Ye’re up to making a bet?” Jack asked.

  “Five days,” Fish repeated. “An’ I said I’d wager.”

  “A week,” Hatcher stated. “No less.”

  “Anyone else?” Solomon asked, gazing around at the others huddled shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the flames as he shook Hatcher’s lean hand.

  “Can’t be soon enough for me,” Kinkead groaned. “No matter how many days.”

  It began to snow again the following morning as the nine of them rolled out and stomped around to stir up some warmth in their limbs. Bass, Kinkead, and Fish went out to take the horses down to water, finding the narrow creek beginning to ice up along the banks. Using a dead limb he found beneath an old cottonwood, Scratch hammered away at a thin crust, breaking a large hole where the animals could drink before taking to the trail.

  As he stood there shivering slightly, huddled within his soot-smudged, grease-stained red blanket, Bass watched the frosty halo over the herd slowly change from a misty gray to a delicate rose as the sun climbed briefly until swallowed by a thickening boil of snow clouds. As he watched, that tint of crimson gradually faded to pewter as the sun continued to rise, hidden once more behind the lowering of the heavens.

  “C’mon, Scratch!” Caleb hollered as he and the others drove the horses back toward their camp. “We only got us five days till we reach Taos.”

  “Seven days!” Hatcher bellowed like a calf hamstrung by a pack of prairie wolves as he struggled past, huffing as he hefted a pack onto the back of a horse.

  Wood waited a moment, then leaned toward Bass. “Five days,” he whispered, and held up all the fingers on one bare hand. “Five.”

  It didn’t matter to Titus. This close, those two days they argued over truly didn’t matter. They were drawing nigh, near enough that Scratch could sense the keen edge to the anticipation building in the others, an anticipation that ignited an excitement of his own.

  As long as he had been out here already, in the last few days Bass was coming to realize that everything would be brand-new in this country south of the Arkansas. Not just the peoples—both Mexican and Indian—but their food and drink as well, along with another new and foreign language bound to fall about his ears. As much as he had been swallowed up in the varied cultures and races at the international port of New Orleans back in his youth, or lived at the St. Louis crossroads of a nation busy with its westward expansion, Bass was surprised to find himself growing as anxious to reach this Mexican village as he had been to enter his first Indian village back in twenty-five.

  But more than anything else, he was finding the country itself different from what l
ay to the north.

  This mountain southwest was truly a land of extreme contrasts. While spring would give birth to richly flowered valleys, so too did high, snowcapped peaks rise well above the desert floor. Green, rolling meadows carpeted the slopes of hills all the way down to sun-hardened desert wastes speckled with ocatillo and barrel cactus, mesquite trees and frequent reminders of an even more ancient time in the sharp-edged, black lava fields that occasionally cluttered the landscape.

  Always the land of the lizard, horned toad, prairie dog, and rattlesnake, this was also a country where he found cottonwood and willow bordering the infrequent gypsum-tainted streams where that “gyp” water might well cause most unaccustomed travelers to grow sick, stricken with a paralyzing bowel distress.

  These vast, yawning valley plains stretched upward toward the purple bulk of hills, from there up to brick-red mountainsides timbered with the ever-emerald-green of pinion pine and second-growth cedar. At sunrise a man would find the treeless ridges staring back at him like some swollen, puffy, fight-ravaged eye. But by the time the sun rose high, that same vista would be painted a hazy blue, eventually turning to a deep purple as the sun finally sank to its rest. In such a land there was sure to come the summer heat of hell, the bitter cold of an unexpected and uncompromising blizzard in winter.

  For much of the last few weeks, the nine and their animals had threaded their way through this high land of brilliant color and startling contrast by following the Rio Grande itself as it flowed due south. Eventually, of an early afternoon, they stopped to water the animals for midday at the mouth of a narrow river that flowed out of the hills to the east to mingle its snow-melt with the Rio Grande.

  “That there be the Little Fernandez,” Caleb Wood instructed as he pointed toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  Come evening, with the sun setting across the valley, those hills themselves would take on a crimson hue so realistic that it had reminded the early Spanish explorers of the blood Christ Himself had shed on the cross.