Luther had gazed at him with his dark eyes, and said, “Keep the knife with you, Jed, you know you can’t outrun a war party of horse afoot. They’re going to string you up by sewing bones through your ankles. Cut your own throat, boy, at the spot where your finger feels the pumper, cut like you seen me do steers in the sacrifice, and cut deep because they’ll try to plug it to have their fun for a spell.”
Jed muttered, “Luther, you old fart, I was just funning you, you sumbitch.”
He felt the knife jangling on the sheath tied to his belt, and he knew the odds were he’d be putting the blade to his own apple. He ran across the hard pan, and he heard their whooping cries bounce past him on the wind. They had seen he was running on foot, and they started whooping. When he saw the last rise before the Ash Run, he turned around with his hands on his knees breathing hard. The war party was five hundred yards back. The weight of day had sunk the glimmer on the horizon, and the war party rode now in the dimness of day that reveals the true shape of things moving upon the plain.
He ran up the rise, and at the top he looked for the copse of white pines where the last pony would be tied up. He turned and saw the war party was at the base of the rise, and he fretted that he couldn’t spur a rangy pony quick enough to cross the Ash before they got to him. The war party was riding hard now, not caring anymore that they were going to kill the ponies under them; they were so close now he knew they could smell him. He ran down and his breath was quitting him, and his legs ached from the starvation of air, but on he ran with the knife jangling in its sheath, bouncing against his hip like a church bell tolling. Jed reached the bottom, and he could hear them yelling as they crested the top of the rise, crashing down upon their ponies to the river meadow. He turned to look over his right and left shoulders and he saw the warriors had fanned out to the sides like the horns of a great bull. He heard the tearing of the sheet around him as their bullets and arrows ripped the fabric of the sky. He threw his legs out in front of him to keep up his speed and keep from falling over. He looked to his right and he could see the crush of horses breaking into the vegetation along the river trying to cut him off between the white birch and the river. The hair on his arms prickled out and it tingled as the air crackled with bullets. He fumbled through the underbrush into the copse of white birch.
They’ll swarm me at the river, he thought. The pony’ll never get the steam up and they’ll swarm me before the river.
He could hear them now twenty or so yards away whooping and thrashing through the trees, the yelling a horrid clash of whoops, laughter, and cries. He felt the knife banging against his hip. Jest get it done, Jed, jest git it done. You’ll be sorry a week from now when the kids in that village’re still poking what’s left of you staked to the ground.
He ran on into the trees and saw flashes of the next mount’s coloring through the trunks of the white pine. The hide was a radiating golden amber, and he realized Toby had left him Ulysses. He nearly whooped, but he had no breath and still he knew it would be a close-run thing.
He snatched the tether from the trunk of a white pine and leapt onto Ulysses’s back, spurring him to the river. Riding the naggy ponies for so long Jed had forgotten the kick of a stallion and was nearly thrown, but he had a handful of the bridle and the mane, and he held on. Ulysses bolted from the trees straight for the river, as if the animal knew what waited for it if the war party got to him too. They were a few yards from him now on all sides and arrows and bullets flew about in a great tumult as the yelling and whooping mass condensed around him as he galloped for the river.
Ulysses flew into the current without breaking stride, and the crash of water nearly sent Jed floating off again over the stallion’s head but he gripped the tuft of mane in one hand and clung for his life, his legs cinched about the neck of the horse. He settled back into the saddle and felt the horse’s mighty pull through the river’s strong current, pulling nearly straight across despite the force of the water. The bullets and arrows ripped the air past his head, but horse and rider crossed, and he rode hard up the far rise, the stallion scaling the heights in an instant with his powerful thrusts.
He jumped off Ulysses at the top, and swung the Winchester off his back. The war party had entered the water but their tired ponies faltered and did not have the strength to carry the riders. He could see warriors floating with the current and the horses floundering. Two warriors swam the river and in four feet of water on the near side Jed dropped them with shots to the chest and belly as they struggled to run in the low water. Three warriors were midstream still on horseback and the slow pace of the swim gave Jed time to aim, breathe, and squeeze, sending each one into the current. He stood and looked at the war party on the far bank and saw that many had dismounted and were standing in silence. One warrior had dropped to sit on a driftwood log, his head slung between his knees. Jed waited and watched the war party move off singly at first and then in hushed columns back south through the trees. No more entered the water.
As darkness shrouded the river, the far side was quiet and empty. Jed saw a lobo wolf skulk in from the east along the far shore of the river, and sniff at a dying pony that kicked passively at the interest. The lobo sat on its haunches and waited for the animal to die. Jed knew the renegades must be gone. He mounted Ulysses and rode on again to the north at a slow trot. By midmorning he was ten miles east of the fort and an hour’s ride to the witch’s hacienda.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:
THE HEALER
* * *
The company crossed the Ash Run; Gabriel led them west along its banks without a word, and Seth could only wonder as to the direction that was taking them farther from home. They came upon a hut built into the wall of the riverbank with a single steel pipe spewing gray smoke and a lone window with a pane of melted glass. The hut was surrounded by gardens and fields terraced up the riverbank. The steps of crops bursting with color and a thousand different birds nesting and flying all about the hut. She emerged from the dark of the door in a simple gray frock dress with a thick sea captain’s leather belt at her waist. She was aged but lean and hard with ample bosom. She had piercing eyes and a great head of gray hair pulled back, revealing a weathered but beautiful face. She was agile and leapt down from the steps of her hut to the path that led up from the river. She studied them as they rode up. All about her were dark-skinned women in head scarves; one pumped water from a well and eyed them without curiosity.
“Well, well, lookee here, my old friends come to visit. Gabriel, where be my Luther?” She sang it out, her voice rich and dripping.
“He moved on west, no word from him yet,” Gabriel said.
“Still searching for his answers, heh? Well, what you bring me, Gabriel? What you bring, Tamara? I see that arrow shaft in Raif. You bring trouble to my doorstep?”
Gabriel dismounted and approached the woman, but kept an arm’s distance. Seth saw she lit a pipe of stone and placed it to her lips, a stream of gray smoke trailing from the bowl. They conferred with one another. The woman shook her head, and Gabriel retrieved a satchel from his saddlebag and doled out gold coins and something shiny Seth could not discern. The woman went to the wagon and touched the young one, but when she felt the belly of the older sister, Tamara shuddered from the feeling of her touch.
“Tamara, see to it?” Gabriel snapped.
“The young one’s not ripe, so no lasting harm except to her marrying prospects—takes a mighty handsome dowry for upstanding church folk to overlook a single buck, let alone a dozen. T’other I think is certain; they had at her and you know how they like to rut, heh, heh, heh,” Tamara said with a taunting laugh.
“See to it.”
“Now, now, Gabe, it ain’t like my craft’s for free.”
“The gold. See to it.”
“I want a piece of Luther’s wood, a piece can burn for a spell; won’t take nothing less to wash the little bitch out.” Tamara voiced it soothingly as she caressed the older sister’s belly.
“Lu
ther would need to see to that.”
“You say Luther gone. They say you can’t take it with you. A piece of the wood, else you’ll be bouncing kin on your knee, Uncle Gabie, heh, heh, heh?”
“See to it, or give me back the pieces.”
“All right, all right, but you bargain’n for a craft takes lifetimes to master and not pay’n what’s due. Ain’t that the way of it.” The woman’s eyes fell on Seth and Caleb. “Who be these two? Why, Gabe, you send them out to kill ’fore they even sired a once, what if they didn’t come back from the deep? Don’t hardly seem fair, bring both on in to the cabin, it warm inside more ways than one and I’ll git ’em fixed right, heh, heh, heh.”
“Stop your ways, Tamara,” the colonel said.
“Now, Colonel, this boy one of yours, ain’t he? He has the look of his mother, sometimes nature be generous in its selection. Oh, look at the eyes, he done heard the music; he tasted the deep—heh, heh, heh—what’s his name, Colonel?”
“Toby.” Toby said it as he looked at her eyes. Tamara moved to his horse and placed her hand upon his thigh and moved it up his leg toward his crotch. Toby felt a rush of blood in his loins as she murmured “Enosh” and then said in an unknown tongue “slain a king,” but somehow Toby understood her voice. Tamara turned and whispered to Raif, “my angel, bring this Toby back to me and I’ll weave you a dreamcatcher, one that’ll let you sleep like a babe in the womb.”
Toby had strung the White Lion’s ears on a coarse leather thong about his neck. Tamara reached up and fingered the ears of the White Lion. She turned to Gabriel, “It be wood or the ear, or the bitch bears a savage.”
Toby wrenched one of the ears free and handed it to Tamara. She looked up at him and pulled his shirt down until his face met hers and whispered to him that she “owed him a debt and that she always pays her debts.” Toby tried to pull away but stopped when Tamara’s breath flowed over him—it was a blend of flowers, fresh-cut peaches, and the smoke of a cooking fire. He breathed it in and felt the warmth of it upon his face, his heart stammering in his chest.
She released him and turned to the others, “Bring the girls to the kitchen,” she said in Spanish to one of the shrouded women. She turned to Gabriel and said, “I’ll wash out the young’n, too—you never know.” She pointed to a copse of birch and said “Camp yonder, it the only place that don’t know wind at night; you can fetch the girls in the late morning; right now I need to see Toby first, then Raif. Toby’s wound deep in the thigh, let me see to it before he bleed out in my yard. I’ll call out when done with them two, and then take Abner and the rest.”
Tamara brought Raif and Toby into the barn and situated them on a flat table. She mixed a potash from stones and herbs and whiskey and crushed it in a clay bowl. She took the paste and smeared it into Raif and Toby’s wounds; each writhed upon the table. She drew a hot poker from the fire and seared their wounds. Toby was in agony, and she came to him and again he tasted her warm, sweet breath. The pain subsided and Toby asked her where she was from. She laughed lightly and said, “I am from right here, this spot, Toby, the river is my father, the earth my mother. I was seeded at night, and fed by the rays of the moon. I’m from beneath us, and I am here always waiting for you to return; I’ll be waiting for you.”
Caleb dismounted and held the bloody bandage tight to his head and asked to the group in general, “What she mean, ‘Toby heard the music’?”
“It don’t mean noth’n. Can’t trust noth’n she says. Renegades think she’s a shaman, but she jest uses what medicine she learned back east to fool ’em. Any woman choose to live out here got to learn to play them devils for fools,” Abner said.
After the healing, the party unsaddled the horses in the white birch woods. They found a defensible position and lit a fire surrounding it with saddles and bedrolls. Abner was given first watch at a knoll that looked down the river for three miles.
Gabriel, Raif, Jed, the colonel, and Wesley sat on their bedrolls around the fire, eating from flat tins of food brought over by one of the shrouded women. As they ate, Caleb asked Wesley if he’d seen any of them Oklahoma Injuns in the Badlands yet.
Wesley said that he had not gone west but south during his months-long furloughs at the academy. He explained that every summer cadets spent eight weeks with an active troop. His tour had taken him through one dry September to Hawkshaw, Mississippi. Wesley quipped, “The only action I saw was four men lynching a black man because some old spinster said he leered at her.”
Caleb asked, “What’s the military got cause to be in something like that?”
“Why? Because the law in Hawkshaw wouldn’t do anything about it. The major’s duty was to maintain the peace under martial law and to also allow the locals to handle local matters with no military interference. Well, this old spinster was apparently the last of a long line of the county’s founding families. She claimed a black man leered at her. Four men took upon themselves to lynch the man. The major demanded that the locals arrest the four but one of them was a town trustee, another one a lawyer. The local sheriff was either a coward or corrupt, and refused, saying he didn’t have enough evidence to arrest leading citizens. Leading citizens, imagine. The locals did nothing; the local magistrate refused to do anything, saying the investigation and the sheriff needed to bring the charges. The four went about their business as if nothing had happened.”
Gabriel asked, “Did he leer at her?”
“Gabriel, you can’t hang a man because some old spinster’s pretending she’s still a southern belle and wants attention. By all accounts he was a good man, worked his own field. Lynching him because of some old spinster’s vanity, that’s barbarism.” Wesley looked around and expected to see nodding heads but found only blank stares. He continued, “Well, if the locals wouldn’t act, the major was going to. Reconstruction was to instill the rule of law, so every man would have justice. The four were arrested and placed in the stockade, and we convened a military tribunal. They were given a proper evidentiary hearing, and all the accused rights were observed.”
The colonel asked, “You hang them?”
Wesley, “No, not a single witness would come forward to testify. Hawkshaw was still lost in the old ways—they learned nothing from the war. It was useless, no jury down there would do justice.”
Gabriel said, “I know that county, that’s how things been done in that county since the first Scots broke ground there. That county always took care of its own business—them folks apply their code to what you’re talking to.”
“What code? What code is that, Gabriel? To lynch an old hand because some spinster said he looked at her skirt?”
The colonel said, “They weren’t defending her honor alone—those folks were protecting the order of things. The four you wanted to hang got the torch passed to them who knew it important to protect a woman’s honor, especially in tough country like that—there’re mothers and young girls that everyone needs to know if you give offense to there’ll be a reckoning—some acts can’t stand if the order of things is to keep.”
“At what cost, Father? Let’s say that hand was innocent; that the old spinster fancied up a tale so people’d pay attention to her. Is the cost of the order of things worth an innocent man going to the rope?”
“Maybe it is, to protect the rest,” Gabriel said.
“Well, then, Gabriel, how about two innocent lives, three? How much blood to keep this code you and my father speak of?” Wesley shot back.
“I fear a world of men without that code,” the colonel retorted.
“It’s the new world. We don’t need a code that’s based on myth. We have the rule of law; we have a Constitution—laws written so that all can read them, not a few self-chosen men who deem themselves executioners of the invisible code,” Wesley snapped.
“Who is the force for those laws, Wesley?” the colonel asked.
“The authority to enforce the law is given by law, and men deputized to use violence if necessary. Philadelphia has h
ad a police force for a hundred years; Boston and New York for decades. I have seen them in operation. I have walked those streets; it works better than vigilantes making justice on the accusations of old women. They are a society bound by law in the East, a law that all answer to: rich, poor, white, black, immigrant, or citizen. Why should it not apply in some backwater like Hawkshaw?” Wesley replied.
McCallum lit his pipe. “Wesley, in this new world you speak of, what is a man allowed to fight for? What will this law of yours justify a man to fight?”
Wesley replied: “The world is changing. What we did out here a thousand miles from a courthouse is one thing, but there’s no excuse for it in Hawkshaw. Law, science, a new frontier, codes, superstitions, myths of honor are relics of the past.”
McCallum pulled smoke from his pipe. “I’ll tell you what I think, under the code of them four, they decided it was a matter of a woman’s honor, right or wrong, that’s what they reckoned. That code built up over near two centuries before that major of yours and his army came to that county uninvited. The tooth was not yet cut on this entire country when the first men laid eyes on the Hawkshaw land. Their fathers fought for it and tamed it from wild. Trappers and indentureds look’n for land to farm. Like all new worlds it got tamed by men like them four you wanted to string up. The first men cut that land open and run out the tribes. Once the tribes’re gone, that kind tend to need someth’n to fight, and if no one’s ’round, they tend to kill each other ’fore long. So families moved out there, well folks begin thinking there’s got to be rules different between the hard men and family folks and such. It’s hard to tame men that ain’t known nothing but the tomahawk; it takes time and so folks build a code to live by—and the first rule is to agree that womenfolk that ain’t whores need to leave be; attacking a woman in word or deed is a killing offense.”
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