A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Do … do you really love me?” she panted as she collapsed against the pillows. “Love me even tonight?”

  He shifted beside the bed, leaning his face more closely over hers as he whispered, “I love you more tonight than I have ever loved you.”

  Sensing his eyes filling, Seamus drew back a little, blinked, and swiped at them with that damp towel. When he looked back down at her, he could see that Sam was weeping.

  “Are you all right?” he begged, worried and anxious.

  She forced a smile with the coming of the next contraction, tears suddenly gushing from the corners of her eyes. “I’ve n-never been b-better—”

  The last word rushed out in a shriek as she clamped down on his hand and doubled up with the pain—panting, grunting, low and feral. The three midwives squeezed in around Samantha.

  “That’s it!” Elizabeth cried. “It’s, here! Your baby’s here!”

  With a jerk he looked down at Mrs. Burt, hoping for some sign of the child. Dear Mither of God—he prayed—protect them both at this moment!

  “I see its head,” Elizabeth went on. “Such hair. So much hair!”

  Sam fell back, her legs—indeed, her whole body—quaking with great, volcanic shudders. Back and forth he looked, his eyes moving between Samantha and Elizabeth Burt.

  “The head is here,” the woman cried out, shifting her position between Sam’s legs now, climbing up on the bed herself to kneel between the knees and shoving the sheet out of the way so that it tumbled down upon Samantha’s great, round tummy. She glanced at Seamus quickly—as if to explain that duty must now dispense with propriety.

  He nodded and looked away obediently, though he wanted so much to watch this child come forth. So much to watch its entrance into this world. Instead he turned back to kiss Sam on the forehead quickly at the moment she began to quiver with a new contraction, then began to growl as she hadn’t before.

  “Yes, Sam!” Martha Luhn prodded. “Give it all you’ve got now!

  Nettie Capron urged, “Push, Sam! Push!”

  She had her fingernails digging into the palm of his hand so deeply, he didn’t know if the dampness he felt was sweat or blood. It didn’t matter. And then he glanced at Elizabeth Burt, saw her hovering close above Sam’s belly.

  “Again!” Elizabeth ordered. “Push harder now, Sam. It’s here! Dear God—your beautiful baby’s here!”

  At Samantha’s other shoulder Nettie Capron coaxed, “One more good push and the baby will be out. Come, now. Give us one more good push.”

  “P-p-push!” Sam gasped, straining, her face flush.

  “That’s it!” Martha Luhn cheered.

  Then Seamus turned quickly, saw the head already cradled in Mrs. Burt’s hands. At that very moment the child burst into a hair-raising squall. With the child’s cry Sam suddenly released the pressure she had on his hand and let out a great sigh. Seamus looked down as she collapsed back against the pillows, panting openmouthed like never before, her eyes clenched shut, tears streaming from their corners. It seemed everything had suddenly gone out of her. He felt queasy in that moment, afraid like never before that she might not have the strength to see this through. All these hours of labor. And now it must surely be early morning … after all that work.

  “It’s a boy!”

  He jerked around, wide-eyed as a mule on a narrow trail, staring at what Elizabeth Burt cradled in her arms. Seeing that dark glob of hair plastered against the strange little creature’s head, its face all pinched and red, streaked with white lather and gobbed with blood. Mrs. Burt shifted the child in her forearms there between Sam’s knees as Nettie Capron came to the side of the bed with a small blanket draped over her arms to receive the child.

  “A b-boy?” Sam asked, trying to lift herself up to see, then tearing her eyes from the child for but a moment as they flicked into Seamus’s—as if asking for his approval.

  “Boy?” he repeated, his lips barely moving, practically no sound escaping from his lips.

  “You’re a father, Mr. Donegan!” Elizabeth Burt congratulated as she laid the newborn across Mrs. Capron’s arms, then went back to work between Sam’s legs, milking the umbilical cord toward the child. That done, the women tied a wrap of sewing thread around and around the cord two inches from the infant’s body, then knotted it off.

  In amazement at it all, Seamus watched Martha Luhn snip the purple cord with a pair of scissors.

  Only then did Nettie Capron straighten, shuffle back the tiny blanket from the face, and scoot down the side of the bed to lay the bundle within Sam’s arms.

  “Is he …,” Samantha started to ask.

  “Is he all right?” Elizabeth Burt repeated, still at work there between the knees. “Of course he is, Sam. He’s just fine. Got all the right equipment, if that’s what you mean. All his fingers and toes. Everything else. Just one thing.”

  “W-what?” Seamus asked in a gasp, twisting about suddenly, frightened at the sound of that.

  The child began to squall, high-pitched and rhythmic, like nothing he had ever heard before. Now he was worried. Truly worried.

  “Don’t know what his folks are going to do,” Elizabeth said gravely, but a smile betrayed her face, eyes twinkling, “seeing how he’s come out about as homely as his father.”

  With a reassuring gush all three midwives chuckled at that and went back to their duties at the foot of the bed as Seamus bent low, helping Sam tug the blanket back from the child’s face all the more.

  “Lemme have a look, Sam,” he whispered as he planted another kiss on her lips glistening with her tears.

  He straightened slightly and began to slowly peel back the folds of the blanket. Beneath it lay the red, squealing, wriggling child—all arms and legs and mouth. The child clenched his eyes in that crimson face as he bellowed in protest.

  “It’s a boy, Sam,” he cried, sensing his own tears begin to sting his eyes.

  “Yes!” Elizabeth Burt exclaimed with genuine joy as she gathered more of the bloody sheets into her arms and passed them on to Nettie Capron. “Just listen to the set of lungs this’un has! My, my—never have I ever heard such caterwauling!”

  Seamus repeated over and over, almost unbelieving how beautiful such a tiny creature could be, “A boy, Sam. A b-boy!”

  Tears welled from his eyes now, his lower lip quivering as it never had before, even as it had in those last few minutes of bachelorhood before he stepped beneath that sheltering oak tree in Sharp Grover’s yard near the Texas panhandle country, prepared to take this woman to his side forevermore.

  She asked him, “You approve, Seamus?”

  “Oh, yes—yes! A girl, a boy,” he answered in a rush, leaning over to kiss the tiny infant’s wrinkled forehead, gently brushing that thick crop of hair with his lips. “Anything—long as you both made it through, Sam.”

  “We made it through,” she whimpered wearily beneath him, her eyes thickly pooling with tears, her lips smiling as she cried in joy. “We both made it through just fine.”

  “He’s beautiful,” Seamus explained as he glanced up at the three midwives. “Don’t you think he’s just about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “Yes, he certainly is at that, Mr. Donegan,” Elizabeth Burt said, still at work there at the foot of the bed. “And if I know anything about his father, Sam: I’ll bet that little one is going to be a real hellion before you know it!”

  Chapter 2

  Canapekasna Wi

  Moon When the Leaves Fall

  Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa called him “Big Leggings.”

  Among the white man he carried the name Johnny Bruguier.

  And ever since the last days of summer Johnny had been running from the whites. They wanted to hang him for murder.

  In the crisp chill of autumn Bruguier stirred the fire before him at the center of the huge lodge he shared with Sitting Bull’s family. The old man and everyone else still slept this morning, exhausted from yesterday’s crossing of the Elk Rive
r.*

  But Johnny could not sleep. It had been like this nearly every night since he’d fled the Standing Rock Agency,† Each time he closed his eyes the nightmares returned to haunt him. He awoke in a sweat. Afraid to close his eyes, afraid of those awful dreams, he instead sat up and tended the fire through much of the night, thinking. Brooding on all manner of things. Mostly on the white men who would hang him. And hating his mother for hooking up with a drunken white trader at the agency more than two decades ago.

  Life had been tough for a half-breed at Standing Rock. So many times while he was growing up had he felt pushed outside the Hunkpapa band. At the same time the whites closed their arms and cloaked their hearts to him. He damned his mother for choosing to bed down with a white man, damned her for ever giving birth to him. Damned himself especially now, for the way things had turned out at Standing Rock.

  Because of his two bloods, Johnny was brought up knowing both languages. His mother knew some English, more than enough to cuss like the agency employees and the white teamsters who came and went. Likewise, his French-Canadian father knew enough Lakota to sweet-talk the agency Sioux out of most everything they owned, in trade for a handful of blue glass beads or a tin cup of whiskey, which the man had buried among his stores of treasures.

  Able to speak both tongues, but feeling at home in neither world, Bruguier had reluctantly attempted to make a home for himself there at Standing Rock for the last few winters. He was one of the agent’s three interpreters—at least that had been his life until he’d rubbed up against the wrong white man.

  The one with the eyes so cold, he figured the man was already one of the “walking dead.” No emotion had shown in those icy eyes, until a young woman had walked into the trader’s store one late December afternoon. On such winter days most of the agency employees sat by the iron stove, whittling, telling stories, sharpening knives, drinking if they had pay coming on account.

  This morning Johnny could feel the sweet tang of winter coming again to the high plains. The sharp teeth of winter were closing in upon them. His fire felt especially good this morning before the sun rose, as he remembered last winter. Remembered the woman. And the one with the walking dead eyes.

  To the white men it would have been nothing more than an argument over a woman. Those things happened in that world. Among the Lakota, it had been a matter of the young woman’s honor. How the white man had shamed her and defiled her when she’d nervously walked into the trader’s store with her grandmother that cold winter afternoon almost a year gone now. No one else was going to tell the white man to take his hand off the woman’s arm. No one else was going to tell the man he should not have cuffed the old woman aside when she’d cried out, trying to remove the white man’s claws from her granddaughter’s arm.

  No one, that is, except Johnny Bruguier.

  As he looked back now, he thought how things had a way of sweeping him up and carrying him along before he knew it. Like a spring torrent of winter runoff rushing between two narrow creekbanks. He had his own knife at work on a piece of ash, carving a new stem for an uncle’s pipe. How the old men loved to spend much time with their pipes and telling stories this season of the year. When the bad words and the loud talk started, Johnny already had his knife out. When the white man pulled his knife, everything hurried by in a blur.

  He remembered the girl being flung aside, landing in a heap atop her old grandmother. He remembered the size of that white man’s knife as he lunged for Johnny. And the last thing Bruguier was ever able to recall was the look in those walking dead eyes as the two men grappled. Those eyes no longer seeming dead at all, but lit with a bright, cold fire—such hate Johnny had never before seen.

  Nor had he ever thought he would see so much blood pour out of a man. Something inside Bruguier had told him to put out the fire in those eyes, but Johnny did not know how he’d accomplished that, for he could remember nothing more until he was standing over the white man thrashing on the floor, bleeding from a dozen or more serious wounds, the floor beneath him slicking with dark puddles of blood and a greasy coil of gut. Too much blood, he had told himself. Too much for any man to lose and still live.

  The white man died at Johnny’s feet, his thrashing stopped, rolling onto his back to stare up at Bruguier with those walking dead eyes. But now he would no longer walk. And the fire was gone from them as they gazed blankly at the half-breed who had killed a white man before so many witnesses.

  How the trader had started hollering, reaching under a counter for his big two-shoot gun. How Johnny had looked at the others, both Lakota and half-breed there in the store, sensing instantly that they would not dare tell the truth about what had happened. Afraid. Cowed. So shamed by their need for the moldy flour and rancid pig meat that they would not tell the truth.

  Johnny fled Standing Rock on a stolen horse. And had been running ever since.

  First to Bear Butte to find solace and help for his troubled spirit among the religious places he had heard so much about. Not that he had never been religious—certainly not like his father’s Catholicism. Nor had he paid much attention to the beliefs of his mother’s people. But he had remembered enough to know about Bear Butte, enough to feel the place call out to him.

  For most of that hard winter he had clung close to the slopes of Bear Butte, hunting, sleeping, keeping an eye out in those early days for any from Standing Rock who might follow him. Only with the waning of winter did he finally relent and allow himself to believe no one would come for him.

  So he wandered south to the Black Hills, that country the white man’s government wanted back from the warrior bands so all white men could come and dig for the yellow rocks that made them hungry for whiskey and whores. It was no problem finding work in those settlements just beginning to dot the Black Hills: unloading wagons brought up from the rail depot at Sidney, Nebraska; helping build sluice boxes; cleaning up after all the puking white men in those great saloons covered with tent canvas, closed-in places that smelled of urine, sweat, and the desecration of that sacred land. There was work enough for any man willing to work. Johnny worked.

  Until that summer afternoon he was tapped on the shoulder by his white employer. Bruguier straightened over his mop and slop bucket.

  “You know anythin ‘bout this?” With a crackle the man noisily unfolded a stiffened parchment with a likeness of Johnny printed on it in black ink. Words, too.

  “What’s this?” Bruguier had asked.

  “Says you’re wanted, mister.”

  “For what?”

  “Murder. You kill someone?”

  His eyes must have given him up when he looked away, unable to look the white man in the face.

  “Tell you what, mister,” the white man continued, “you best be on your way and now. These here posters is going up all over town. They’ll be up all over the hills afore the sun sets tomorrow. Likely you’ll be as easy for others to spot, just as easy to catch. Then some miner’s court decide to hang you.”

  To this day Johnny remembered clear as sunrise how that white man with dirt caked down in those deep wrinkles on his face and the wattle of his neck had pantomimed a rope dropping over his head, tightened, then strangled at the end of that noose. As calmly as he could, Johnny had nodded and set his mop against the wall. Then turned away, not once looking over his shoulder.

  He stole another horse that day, the biggest one of those tied at the side of the saloon. Not one of the horses out front at the rail, but back in the shadows, an animal with a blaze face and two front stockings. It looked strong enough to carry him fast and far. But the best thing that made Johnny decide on the horse was what was tied behind the saddle: a thick blanket roll, wrapped in an oiled slicker, along with those two saddlebags stuffed to their limit. Plain to see that horse and rigging were ready for the trail.

  Bruguier kicked the animal into a gallop as soon as he put the last tent behind him, heading west toward the setting sun. East and north meant trouble. That’s where the white men we
re, with their pictures and their stories of murder, the nightmare of their hanging ropes that choked off the only chance his spirit could fly out of his mouth when he breathed his last. No man must die that way.

  The only direction for him lay to the south and west. There was damned little of the white man north of the Platte or south of the Yellowstone, clear to the Big Horn Mountains. Especially that summer after the Lakota and Cheyenne had whipped the pony soldiers something fierce in two big fights. He set off to find sanctuary among his mother’s people—that, or this journey would be his suicide.

  Beside his fire that first summer night after fleeing the white man’s settlements, Johnny unfurled the oiled rain poncho and rolled out the blankets inside their bedroll, a long canvas sack. Within he found a pair of well-worn batwing chaps.

  “A cow-boy,” he murmured to himself as he stood to hold the chaps against his hips, admiring the way they fluttered as he pranced around the fire ring—just the way the long fringe on Lakota leggings fluttered with a man’s every step.

  The next morning he put on the weathered chaps, running his hands over the dark oiled color of the leather. He had worn them ever since. Had them on that early morning he caught sight of the smoke rising from many fires beyond the low range of hills in the distance. By the time he reached the top of a far knoll, the smoke had dissipated and the village was already in motion for the day, slowly making its way north by west—back toward the Owl River.* Bruguier cautiously followed them all day, watchful of outriders protecting the massive line of march, all those women and children and travois, which would have stirred up a lot of dust had it not been for the season of the rains. By the time the procession went into camp, Johnny had them figured for Lakota. One band or another—but Lakota for sure. How he wanted to taste the words on his tongue once more, and forget the white man’s language for the rest of his days.

  Riding down from the slope slowly, he saw several of the young warriors turn and notice him while lodgepoles were being set in their proper order, lodge covers being unfurled over the first. Johnny kicked that big American horse in its flanks and rolled into an easy gallop. With a burst of noise and a flourish of the hat he ripped from his head, Bruguier shot past the warriors coming out to challenge him—dashing straight into the camp, knowing enough to aim for the center of the great village. Dead in the middle of the two horns of the crescent, he would find the chief’s lodge. There he should be safe—despite the fact that he was dressed in white man’s clothes. Despite the whole summer of bloody warfare against the white man.