Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  To the Ute way of thinking, the Arapaho were the interlopers, nothing more than unwanted trespassers, dangerous and deadly newcomers … at the same time what white men the Ute had run across had posed no danger—after all, the trappers were far too few, showing up infrequently at best, then moving on quickly enough without setting down roots. In short, the pale-skinned beaver hunters posed no real threat to Ute sovereignty of these high mountains, parks, and pine-ringed valleys.

  But, like the Apache and Navajo to the south, like those Comanche raiding out of the southeast, now the Arapaho and the Cheyenne were threatening along the borders of Ute land from their traditional haunts on the eastern plains.

  Within days it would be time for the Ute chiefs to deliberate and argue where best to move their winter camp to another site with better grazing for their ponies, more wood for their fires, a place where the winds did not carry so much of the stench of human offal and rotting carcasses of game brought in to feed the many hungry mouths.

  But Bass knew none of this.

  Titus slept fitfully that first night he was dragged through the doorway and deposited upon the widow’s blankets. Here at last, he told himself, he could try sleeping through the sharp pain as the edges of his wounds rubbed one another with the manhandling, the crude travois jouncing over uneven ground. To lay in one spot and just sleep. But the male voices were no sooner gone than the woman herself was busy above him.

  Unable to get his coat off, Fawn did only what she could do. For a few minutes there he was somewhat conscious of hearing the heavy blanket wool being cut, sliced, hacked away with her cooking knife. Then it felt as if she were slowly, delicately, slashing along the seam of the left arm, down the left side of the shirt she had made for him weeks earlier. Finally he felt her tugging where the smoked leather of the shirt crossed over his left shoulder.

  By cutting the shirt half off the left side of his body, Fawn was able to pull it off the right side, for the first time fully exposing the three deep gashes, blue and purple and a deep brown against his startling white flesh. So swollen, so oozy, were the wounds that she gasped and began to sob.

  It might have been only the cold still air or the sudden silence there within the lodge, or it might have been her stifled sobs—but something made Titus open his eyes at that moment, finding it hard to focus in the dim light, the fire’s reflection flickering on the lodge skin behind her. Then his eyes found her crumpled over beside him, her head pressed down in her hands, her tiny shoulders shuddering as she did her best to stifle the sobs that racked her.

  She nearly jumped when his right hand reached out and gently touched her arm.

  “I … I ain’t gonna die,” he said in English—forgetting himself—his mouth as dry as it had ever been.

  Bass watched her eyes pool as she brushed fingers down his hairy cheek. The moment he licked his dry, cracked lips, she understood. Quickly she dragged over a small kettle of cool water and from it pulled a buffalo horn fashioned into a large spoon, which she used to slowly pour rivulets of life past his parched lips, blessed drops washing across his dry tongue, spilling into his throat.

  In the end he had strength enough to nudge the horn spoon aside and turn his face away, closing his eyes once more. How he wanted to do nothing but sleep that night, for a few moments thinking just how sweet it would be to wake up in the dim light of early dawn, finding her naked beside him in the quiet stillness before first light … to awaken and find that all of this was nothing more than a dream. So sweet was it to imagine the feel of that freedom from the pain of his body, so real was it to feel her steamy flesh against his—

  Scratch nearly came off the buffalo-robe bed, his back arching in sudden, unexpected, excruciating pain.

  “I’m sorry!” she cried out to him in Ute.

  He looked at her in surprise, perhaps some disgust, then peered over at his shoulder. The deepest wound had begun to bleed freely again. When he looked back at her, Bass, found in her hands the rough ball of moss-green lichen dripping water and some of his crusted blood in the narrow strip of pounded dirt there between the robe bed and the fire pit.

  “Damn you, Fawn,” he growled in English. “That hurt like hell!”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated again in her tongue.

  Then it suddenly hurt him that he had lashed out and hurt her. His foggy, pain-crazed mind cleared, like a wind blowing away wisps of thick mist. “You were cleaning me?” Bass inquired in Ute.

  “Yes. I need to open the wound, to clean it well before I can put my plants in it.”

  “P-plants,” he stammered. Just the thought of any more scrubbing on the deep, jagged gashes … the prospect of anyone probing down into that torn, ugly, purple muscle was enough to make his head ache and spin as it was.

  “Plants,” she repeated, dragging up a large soft-skinned bag to lay across her lap as she sat there beside him, her legs tucked to the side in that way of a woman. Holding back the large flap, Fawn pulled several smaller pouches tied at their tops with thongs, then retrieved two wooden vials, at the top of which were stuffed wooden stoppers.

  “You put your plants in my wounds?”

  She nodded, biting her lip between her crooked teeth as if she knew for certain herself what pain that announcement must cause him.

  “Your husband—you used your plants for him?”

  Her eyes immediately dropped to her hands in her lap, shuffling absently some of the pouches and wooden vials. “No. I did not have a chance to try healing my husband. He was dead when they returned his body to our village.”

  How he wished he could trade places with one of the others right now, even simpleminded Billy Hooks. Staring up at the spiral of poles laced within one another at the top of the lodge, Titus hurt of the flesh from his wounds, hurt of the heart for what pain this woman endured.

  “As I told you before, I won’t die,” he repeated, this time in Ute.

  “Your wounds, they are terrible.”

  As much as he did not want to look, Titus turned his head slightly and peered down at them. And quickly looked away. They were ghastly. Long ribbons of flesh torn asunder by the sharp, tumbling knives on that Arapaho war club. If nothing else was done for them, he was sure someone would have to attempt pulling the edges of the flesh together once more.

  At least that is what his grandpap, even his own pap, had done for animals who suffered tragic accidents or falls. Stuffing some moist, chawed tobacco down into the edges of the wound before using a woman’s sewing needle and thread to draw things shut. Perhaps even some spider’s web at the edges of the laceration, if one could find such a thing back in the corners of the cabin or barn. His mam claimed it helped in drying out the edges of the wound, helped the flesh knit back together as it dried. Healing the most natural way possible. Something folks on the frontier took in stride and Bass had always taken for granted.

  The way a Chickasaw arrow was cut from the meat of Ebenezer Zane’s leg. Or the way Beulah had bound up Hames Kingsbury’s ribs, then prayed over him till he was healed. Or the many times the blackened but steady hands of Hysham Troost had laid poultices on wounds Titus brought home from the Wharf Street watering holes, drawing out the poisons until it was time to pull the flaps of skin together with some of Mother Troost’s sewing thread.

  But never had he laid eyes on anything near as terrible as this.

  “Leave it be, Fawn,” he told her softly as his eyes closed. “Just cover me now and let me sleep.”

  He felt her drag a wool blanket over him, gently laying the corner over that bloody shoulder and upper arm. Then she pulled a buffalo robe over that. The weight of it felt reassuring there as he began to drift off again into that netherworld somewhere between healthy sleep and what fitful unconsciousness the mind conjures up in its attempt to escape the brutal trespass of pain.

  The last he remembered was the coolness of her hand and the roughened touch of the damp lichen she held in her fingers, brushing back the long, unkempt hair from his forehead a
nd the sides of his face. Cool water, as she continued attempting to put out the fire of that fever she was certain was already on its way.

  Somewhere in the darkness he was certain they were jabbing hot pitchforks into his side. Scooping a huge shovel filled with smoldering coals into his ears, one after another, so that his head filled with smoke and steam and unbearable heat, searing the back of his eyes, choking him with the rising torture.

  How he thrashed and shuddered, kicking violently at the blankets and the robe, flinging them from his body until the pain reminded him of the wounds and he came close to wakefulness—enough to recognize just where and how much he hurt—fully expecting as he opened his eyes into pain-weary slits that he would see the tiny demons who were Old Lucifer’s cloven-hoofed minions gathered in a tight ring all about him, jabbing at him with their instruments of interminable death.

  Oh, how he had listened in childlike rapture to the wandering pastors who had circled back and forth across the length of Boone County when he had been young. Their breath smelling of fire and brimstone, each one invariably continued to preach to the family who invited them back to their land after church service for a home-cooked meal and a warm place to sleep over the Sabbath night before the circuit rider moved on the next morning.

  But Scratch did not find Lucifer there at hand. Nor his diminutive demons. Nonetheless, as he lay there in Fawn’s lodge, he believed the old bastard himself had just taken his leave of the place—hot as Bass was. For the love of a cool dip in that pond back home right about now. Even to have someone rub some snow on his burning skin right now.

  Where was she?

  “Fa … Fawn?”

  He barely heard his own voice croak her name. Then he called out again, this time trying to force it, make it louder. She was there almost immediately—the sound of her coming through the door flap, the shadow of her holding the bail of the kettle in one hand, setting it on the low flames with a sputter.

  “Water,” he demanded in English, rubbing his dry, cracked lips. “Water.”

  She understood the word, the gesture, and sank to her knees at his side with the horn spoon, scooping up his head within an arm, pulling him up gently and pressing the spoon against his lips.

  “The fire,” she declared quietly as most of the water dribbled from the corner of his mouth, “the fire burns you up from inside.”

  “Fire,” he repeated in a tortured croak. “Put out the fire, Fawn.”

  He closed his eyes to the tears of pain, to the drops of sweat running off his brow, to the dancing shapes of hideous reality flickering on the lodge skins, and tried to think back to that first Rocky Mountain snow last autumn as the high country began to cool and the aspen quaked in the breeze that carried on it the prophecy of winter. So cold and dry were the flakes that he caught them on his sleeve, on a blanket mitten, then blew them off like a sprinkling of ash. Cold, white ash landing on his face, tangled in his eyelashes, melting on his tongue. Like no snowflakes he had ever tasted back east along the Missouri, farther still in Kentucky—

  The moment something was pressed against his lips, Titus opened his eyes again into narrow slits. He could see the movement of the woman so near that he heard her tiny bursts of breath coming fast and shallow. Slowly she poured the liquid against his parting lips. Bitter, so bitter a taste that he coughed, sputtering, spewing it from his mouth as he turned his head.

  “No,” she said sharply, that word spoken just as tough as the way she had uttered it that day long ago when she had destroyed those infested white-man clothes of his.

  She grabbed hold of a clump of long hair at the nape of his neck and wrenched his head around into a cradle of her forearm.

  “Drink,” the woman commanded.

  “No, tastes like shit,” he whimpered in English, nearly a sob as his eyes filled with more stinging salt dripping from his forehead.

  “Drink,” she repeated. “Cold—for the fire inside you. Put out the fire.”

  “Put out the fire,” he echoed in Ute.

  So he drank a sip, physically forcing the foul-tasting, bitter liquid back on his tongue, down his throat. Then pursed his lips to drink a bit more. Then more until she no longer pressed the spoon against his lips.

  Like sudden freedom, he savored those moments after Fawn laid his head back upon the buffalo robe and withdrew her arm, like stolen, furtive heartbeats he was sure were quickly going to lead him back into the escape of sleep now.

  But instead she brushed more of the cool water across his forehead and face, then murmured something to him about a willow stick.

  Bass felt an object pressed against his lips. Figuring it to be more of the fire-eating liquid, he opened his mouth slightly, his eyes tearing open into slits. But this time instead of the spoon, the widow pressed between his teeth a thin wand of willow.

  “Bite on this,” she instructed quietly, “when you want to cry out.”

  Cry out? Cry out for what? Nothing could be worse than what she had already put him through. He had no need to cry out now, not now that she had finished pouring that bitter water down his throat. All he needed now was to sleep … so why in the devil would she say he might want to cry out—

  His back arched, convulsing with the sudden, sharp stab of pain at his shoulder, radiating clear to the roof of his head and to the soles of his feet. Sputtering, Bass finally got his tongue to shove the willow wand out from between his teeth and started to growl, spittle dripping from both corners of his mouth.

  As suddenly he felt big hands on him, sensed the peeled willow wand shoved not so gently against his teeth this time—clearly without the kindness of the widow.

  Through the tears and drops of sweat pooling in his eyes, Titus tried to make out who was there with Fawn. Who held him down as he struggled against the thunderous pain in his shoulder, the torment shooting down the entire length of his left arm? Bass could not recognize him. Blinking, he wanted to be certain who it was because Titus swore to kill the bastard once he was healed and strong enough to go searching for the one who had forced him to endure this pain.

  He shrieked, crying out, then whimpered in his fevered torture, trying his best to thrash back and forth, to arch his back up, throw off the oppressive weight of his handler, to kick free of the one who seemed to sit squarely on top of him.

  Then as suddenly he felt as weak as a newborn calf, his legs gone to butter. Oh, the pain was still there, so he had to save what strength he had left so that he would not die. No more did he have anything to use in fighting this strong one.

  Maybe it was Cooper. Big enough, strong enough to be. Cooper would be the sort to enjoy this. Maybe even simpleminded Billy Hooks. No, he decided: they would be off whoring with their squaws right now. Days of hunting away from camp meant they would have one thing and one thing only on their minds. So they would be with their women, thrashing about in the robes instead of thrashing about with a fevered friend.

  Maybeso it was Tuttle. Of the three, he believed he could count on Bud.

  Tightly Bass clamped his eyes shut, trying to squeeze all the moisture from them so when he opened his eyes, he could see who had come to help the widow.

  Into slits, then open wider still … until he peered up at the old, lined face. Skin darker than an old saddle. More seams and wrinkles in it than a cottonwood trunk. Eyes old and all-seeing, yet somehow possessed of a deep kindness as they gazed down at him in these last few of the white man’s futile, fevered convulsions.

  She spoke to the old one in hushed tones. He replied in same. Behind them both the small boy whimpered. Fawn touched Bass’s forehead one last time with her cool hand, then turned away and went to the child.

  Likely to feed the boy, he thought as he laid his cheek against a damp, cool spot on the buffalo robe beneath him where some of his sweat had collected. How long had it been since he’d had to pee? Titus wondered. He couldn’t remember peeing since before they were jumped by the Arapaho. And he wondered if he had done the unthinkable—to go and wet h
imself. Still, he felt wet everywhere on his body, everywhere his fingers touched. Maybe Fawn and this old man would not notice he had wet himself, since he was damp all over.

  Then he realized it might just be all right. He hadn’t done the unthinkable. The fever—it had taken every drop of moisture in his body, soaked it up, and poured it out through his skin. There’d been nothing left for him to pee.

  Funny how a man thought on such things like that when walking up the threshold to death’s door.

  The strong, leathery arm raised his head. Bass felt the hard, smooth texture of the horn spoon pressed against his lips.

  Yes, he thought. Water. The more I drink, maybe I can live. More, his mind echoed, convincing himself. This was sweet and clear. Not the bitter water she gave him. More.

  Bass drank his fill until he could drink no more, and slept.

  “You have been gone a long, long time,” the voice said out of the darkness as Bass’s eyes fluttered open.

  His mouth was dry again, his lips so parched, he could feel the oozy cracks in them … but his skin no longer felt as tight and drawn as it had when he had been burning up with the fire of that fever.

  For a moment he struggled to focus, then gazed at the old man’s face, watching it withdraw and the widow’s replace it right above him. Staring down at him with a wide, crooked-tooth smile.

  “You are back from wandering the dark paths,” she said, her fingertips lightly touching his brow. “For some time now you have not been hot. It is good.”

  “Yes,” he said in English, recognizing only the Ute word for “good.” Too hard to try remembering the Ute words now, to say them or understand them. If he ever could remember them again. So sure was he that the fever had burned away a good portion of what little he had in the way of his mind, just as a farmer set his fires to burn away the stalks from last year’s crop so that the next spring’s planting had that much better a chance.