Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “No—my pappy thought the rumbling and the roaring under the floor come from the dogs chasing a coon critter under our cabin. We all come right out of our beds—hearing the dogs outside the window, in the yard—all of ’em howling and yowling. Wasn’t a one of ’em under the floor!”

  “You all knowed right then it weren’t the dogs?”

  “Pappy hit the floor with his knees, and my mama was right beside him—and they both started praying like I ain’t ever heard ’em pray afore or since. Their eyes so big—saying they was sure the day of judgment was at hand.”

  “I was up the Ohio a ways that cold day,” Titus explained. “Remember my own self how the ground rolled and shook so hard, the river come back on itself.”

  “We was all on our knees—praying our hardest together,” McAfferty continued his story. “Soon as my mama went to singing ’Shall We Gather at the River,’ the might of the Holy Spirit come right over me, commanding my tongue to speak words right from the Bible: ’Thou are my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.’”

  “You knowed those words by heart back then?”

  “I never paid me much attention to the lessons my mama gave me from the Bible,” Asa admitted. “But there I was—watching my pappy pray like he never done afore, the trees outside our window swaying this way and that, big limbs snapping off like they was fire kindling, my sisters caterwauling like painter cubs … when my mama up and tells us all she see’d it all real plain, see’d it as a sure sign that I was to preach God’s word to his wayward flocks.”

  Scratch nodded, enthralled with the story. “You knowed back then you was made for speaking them Bible words.”

  McAfferty snorted and rubbed the raw end of his cold nose. “No, Mr. Bass. I was a idjit nigger back in them days. This child just laughed at the notion of me taking up the Lord’s work. ’Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.’”

  “You didn’t turn to preaching then and there with that ground shaking under you?”

  With a wag of his head Asa declared, “No, not till later on that year when we had us a great shooting star come burning ’cross the sky. The ground shook under my feet. But that star was something made me look right up at heaven. Something made me behold the power of the Lord. ’The God of glory thundereth.’ Maybeso the ground shook for there is the dominion of the devil hisself … but to have me a sign from above, from the realm of God!”

  “That’s when you knowed you had a calling then and there?”

  “That shooting star come back night after night,” he explained. “Made it plain I had the Lord’s calling.”

  For the next few years Asa studied the family’s Bible, investing nearly every waking hour not spent in the McAfferty fields in reading, prayer, and long walks in the woods as he talked to his Maker.

  “Wasn’t until eighteen and sixteen when I felt the burning in my heart that set me on the path to tell others of the word of our redeemer.”

  It wasn’t long after that the young circuit rider took a proper wife. For more than a year his heart had been the captive of Rebekka Suell’s beauty. Finally, as the eldest in the family of nine children he visited once a month on his lonely circuit, sixteen-year-old Rebekka’s pa agreed to Asa’s marriage proposal.

  McAfferty dolefully wagged his head now as darkness came down on the valley. “I can see how it weren’t no life for a woman—that riding the circuit from gathering house to gathering house. What few days a month we was home, she tried her best to keep up a li’l garden, and I done my best to bring game to our pot … but we never had much more’n my trail of the Lord’s calling and that tiny piece of ground where I scratched us a dugout from the side of a hill.”

  By 1819 two interlopers came in and filed for ownership on the land where Asa had neglected to make his claim formally. Amid rumors that they accepted “donations” from rich landowners, the slick-haired government folks issued a demand that threw Asa off his place.

  “‘Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.’ Losing what little we had took the circle for Rebekka,” Asa declared with bitterness. “With her gone, I put what little I had in my saddle pockets and set to drifting.”

  Asa preached where he could, wheedling a meal here and there, sleeping out in the woods or slipping into some settler’s shed when the weather turned wet or cold. Those next two years were a time of sadness, loneliness, despair. Still—he had his Bible, and his faith that the Lord was testing him for something far, far bigger.

  In the late spring of twenty-one he found himself among the outflung Missouri settlements, hearing news that two traders by the name of McKnight and James had cast their eye on the villages of northern Mexico.

  “Asa McAfferty had no home in the white diggings,” he said. “And this was one nigger what had him nothing or no one to leave behind. Even the tiny flocks I was shepherd to didn’t heed to my warnings that the world was near its end. ’For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not!’”

  “That when you come west? Twenty-one?”

  “I was a man broke down, ground under the heel: ready to look west for my salvation, Mr. Bass,” and he nodded. “The west—where a man depends only upon the Lord … and mayhaps a rare friend, for his daily salvation. ’This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.’”

  On through the late autumn Bass and McAfferty continued their crossing of the craggy mountains and the desert wastes as the days continued to grow short, as the nights lengthened beneath each starlit ride, pushing hard for the Rio Grande. It was snowing the night they reached its banks—a light, airy dusting, the air around them filled with the sharp tang of a harder snow yet to come.

  “Santy Fee ain’t far off now,” Asa said, nodding to the east.

  “We going there?”

  “Not ’less’n we want to cut out more trouble for ourselves,” McAfferty replied. “’They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.’”

  Downstream at a ford they crossed that black, shimmering ribbon in the dark and rode until the sky began to lighten in the east before locating an arroyo where there were enough leafless cottonwood to provide some shelter, branches to disperse the smoke from their tiny campfire, modest protection from any distant, any curious, eyes.

  So they skirted Santa Fe and its seat of Mexican territorial power, wary of the frequent army patrols the officials sent out—soldados instructed to detain any gringo careless enough to be caught on Mexican soil with beaver but with no Mexican license to trap that fur. Better was it for them to stay with the Rio Grande as they continued north each night rather than make for the well-traveled road that lay between the territorial capital and that string of villages in the Taos valley itself.

  By the time they drew close to the Sangre de Cristos, Scratch imagined he could actually smell the burning piñon on the cold winter air in the gray light of a rosy dawn. At the knob of a hill they halted, their noses greeted with more of that smoke carried on a wind working its way out of the north, their eyes falling on the welcome sight of those clusters of mud-and-wattle huts, those neat rows of adobe homes arranged along a maze of narrow streets, all of them nestled across a whitewashed, snowy landscape.

  McAfferty took in a deep breath, sighing. “’Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses. And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. ’”

  Watching the keen fire in the man’s icy-blue eyes, Scratch shuddered with a gust of that cold wind and followed the white-head down the snowy slope.

  Los Ranchos de Taos was the first village the trappers reached at the bottom of the broadening valley. Beyond it lay the largest of the local villages—San Fernando de Taos—li
ghtly veiled this sunup by a low cloud of firesmoke. Farther still they could make out the squat buildings of San Geronimo de los Taos.

  “I’ll lay it’s San Fernando where Jack Hatcher and his boys brung you,” Asa proclaimed, pointing out the prominent church steeple.

  “We didn’t come in to town all that much,” Bass admitted. “Stayed out to Workman’s place, mostly. When we first come in, he said it was a far sight better if we didn’t show our faces in town too much. After we went for them women took by the Comanche—things was better for us.”

  “‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself,’” Asa quoted.

  Wagging his head, Titus declared, “Much as they appreciated what we done, them greasers wasn’t about to treat us like one of their own. ’Specially after that fight we had with them soldiers.”

  “We’ll go round and lay up at Workman’s our own selves,” McAfferty instructed. “Be best we don’t make too much a show of ourselves. Not just yet. Till that whiskey maker tells us what be the temper of these here greasers.”

  As they reined away from the road leading into San Fernando, Bass gazed longingly at the buildings still shuttered against the cold of the winter night, at the piñon and pine garlands draping the doorways and windows, at those ghostly wisps of smoke starting to curl from the chimneys of each low-roofed house as its inhabitants began their day.

  “They prepare for our Lord’s blessed birthday,” McAfferty commented as they pitched toward the hills west of town. “Even these Mex celebrate the Lord’s sacred birth, Mr. Bass. Might’n be some hope for these people yet.”

  A land of extreme contrasts this: dotted with flowering valleys in the spring, shadowed by high, snowcapped peaks year-round, with green rolling meadows butting up against the sun-baked hardpan, desert wastes speckled only with cactus, lizard, and scorpion. Along the banks of each of the infrequent streams grew borders of cottonwood sinking their roots deep to soak up the gypsum-tainted water that rumbled through the bowels of many an unaccustomed American come fresh from the States.

  Here in dawn’s first light the snowy valley lay like a rumpled, cultured-folk bedsheet, rising unevenly toward the purple bulk of the surrounding foothills, farther still to that deep cadmium red of those slopes the sun’s first rising would soon ignite, mountainsides timbered with the emerald cloak of piñon, blue spruce, and fragrant cedar. How quickly the light changed as night gave way to day, as deep hues softened and the last of winter’s stars flickered out in the brightening sky right overhead.

  The bruised-eye black of night faded around them, and Scratch said, “Caleb and them others, they didn’t tell me much at all ’bout the time you run with ’em.”

  “Some men keep their own counsel, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty eventually replied.

  “Will you tell me?”

  Asa turned to look at Bass for several moments, then answered. “Been trapping for two years already by the time I hooked up with Johnny Rowland, Jack Hatcher, and the rest in Taos. That first season we worked our way north across the Arkansas.”

  “That’s a good bunch,” Bass said.

  “Johnny Rowland,” McAfferty said with fond remembrance. “Now, he’s a Welshman—almost like me own kin. Yes, I took to Rowland, right off.”

  Two years of trapping and Indian fighting, wenching and wintering in Taos, found the free trappers up close to Arikara country.

  Asa clucked. “Them critters never really took to a white man, Mr. Bass.” Then he growled bitterly, “’Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.’”

  Jack Hatcher’s brigade made the mistake of crossing the homebound path of a Ree war party returning from raids in Sioux country to the south. When both sides drew up, keeping their wary distance, the warriors signed that they sought only to trade with the white men. In order to buy themselves some time to slip off after dark, the trappers said they would open their packs—but not till morning.

  “Night come on, and us fellers all gathered up round our li’l fire we made inside our packs where we figgered to fort up there at the edge of that Ree camp, ever’one of us ready for what be coming—knowing Rees’re good ones for hair stealing.”

  Hatcher and McAfferty sent Joseph Little out to determine just how well the Arikara had them surrounded. He returned well after darkness with distressing news that there lay but one path for making good their escape without alerting the enemy. In the dark that would take them along a narrow prairie goat trail that switchbacked up the side of a thousand-foot bluff.

  Bass exclaimed, “Sounds to be your powder was damp!”

  With his mitten Asa smoothed his long white beard. “‘Though a host shall camp against me, my heart shall not fear. And now shall my head he lifted up above my enemies round about me. Deliver me not over unto the will of my enemies.’”

  But just as the trappers were gathering at their fire to lay plans for their flight, who should show up to speak to McAfferty but the war party’s medicine man himself, signing that he wanted to speak with Asa alone. The two stepped away toward the black belly of the timber, stopping just beyond the ring of faint firelight, in that darkened no-man’s-land between the two groups.

  “When we got stopped in the dark, off from the other coons, that Ree nigger made it plain he wanted me Bible!” McAfferty roared in indignation. “’Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them; I am the Lord your God!’”

  “What happed?” Scratch asked. “Did that nigger get your Bible?”

  “When I told him he wasn’t ’bout to get my Bible—the heathen tried to rip the book right outta me pouch—signing that he wanted the power of me own medicine!”

  When McAfferty refused a second time, the Indian threatened that he would have the Bible before sunrise anyway … along with Asa’s scalp, which he said he would hang from his belt pouch.

  “‘And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen, neither shall the beast of the land devour them; but they shall dwell safely, and none shall make them afraid,’” Asa declared. “I wasn’t ’bout to be buffaloed by no red nigger. No matter he was a medicine man or not!”

  But the trapper’s strong protests caused the Arikara to explode. At that moment the Indian suddenly yanked out his tomahawk, lunging in close … but McAfferty was just a little faster with his skinning knife.

  “Parted that red nigger’s ribs, I did,” Asa admitted, patting the handle to his knife. Then he shuddered slightly, although the air had begun to warm with the sun’s coming.

  “Dropped him where we stood. ’And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death.’ But … I didn’t take his scalp, Mr. Bass. I left him be where he fell.”

  “You raised them Apaches’ hair. Why didn’t you take his hair?” Titus inquired.

  “That was afore I knowed better.” Then McAfferty turned to gaze at Bass with a mortified look. “I wasn’t ’bout to cut off the hair of no medicine man! There’s been many a thing I done in my life I’m sure the Lord don’t look kindly upon … but I wasn’t gonna raise the scalp of a medicine man, Mr. Bass.”

  “Way it looks, your horn was empty.”

  “By damned—I was in a proper fix then and there,” McAfferty agreed. “’Yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.’”

  “How’d you come to get your leg outta that trap you fixed to close around it?”

  “Shaking just like the trembling earth come Judgment Day, I creeped on back to our camp and told them others real quietlike what just happened with the medicine man. Said I knowed for sure now the Rees was getting blackened up for morning. But Hatcher, Rowland, Kinkead, and the rest acted like they wasn’t listening to me—all of ’em just looked at me with the queer on t
heir faces.”

  Titus nodded. “They told me how you come back with your hair turned white.”

  Slapping the top of his thigh, Asa said, “Damn if my head weren’t as white as the fur on a winter snowshoe hare! And that sure scared all them boys something fierce.”

  Scratch asked, “Didn’t it scare you none?”

  McAfferty quietly replied, “I was more scared than all the rest put together. I’d be damned for crucifying through all eternity if I didn’t admit it was the truth. The Almighty Hisself had turned my head to white—done it to show me the power of the Holy Ghost! ’For the Lord most high is terrible; He is a great King over all the earth.’ It was plain as paint to me, Mr. Bass: Asa McAfferty had set his foot on evil ground! I figgered I’d even had a hand in setting free them Rees, the devil’s own hellions, myself.”

  “Hatcher said you all made tracks that night.”

  “Somehow we got our horses up the side of that canyon in the dark and slipped off ’thout getting caught by them Rees. But it never were them warriors I was ’fraid of while we was running south.”

  “What?”

  “It were them evil spirits I could feel all round me—clawing at my shoulder, breathing on my neck, hanging just at the corner of me eye every time I turned to look.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Maybeso,” he eventually answered as they reached the foothills. “They was the spirits from the beyond, Mr. Bass. The same spirits that ol’ Ree medicine man was carrying with him … them devil’s whelps what come after me then and wasn’t ’bout to let go their hold on me. ’Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee?’”

  “Sounds like you was more scared of them spirits than you was scared of that Ree war party what was bound to be coming after you.”

  “Abominations, Mr. Bass!” he began with a voice that shriveled to an ominous quiet. “Asa McAfferty ain’t never been ’fraid of anything he can see. What I can’t see be the only thing what scares Asa McAfferty!”